RUSSIA 


SZSXLOJU&Al 


UNIVERSITY  OF 

AT   LOS  ANGELES 


GREAT  RUSSIA 


MR.  KNOPF'S  NEW  BOOKS 

GREEN  MANSIONS 
by  W .  H.  Hudson 
With  an  Introduction 
by  John  Galsworthy 

MEMOIRS  OF  A  PHYSICIAN 
by  Vikenty  Veressayev 

THE  LITTLE  DEMON 
by  Feodor  Sologub 

A  HERO  OF  OUR  TIME 
by  M.  Y.  Lermontov 

GREAT  RUSSIA 

by  Charles  Sarolea 

THE  OLD  HOUSE 
by  Feodor  Sologub 

BIRDS  AND  MAN 
by  W.  H.  Hudson 

OTHERS 

An  Anthology  of  the  New  Verse 

SELF  GOVERNMENT  IN  RUSSIA 
by  Paul  Vinogradov 


GREAT  RUSSIA 

Her  Achievement  and  Promise 


BY 

CHARLES  SAROLEA 

D.  Litt.  (Liege)  D.  Ph.  (Brussels)  LL.  D.   (Montreal) 
D.  Juris  (Cleveland) 


NEW  YORK 
ALFRED  A  KNOPF 

1916 


COPYRIGHT,  1916,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF 


PRINTED  IN  AMERICA 


DK 
5 14 


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TO 
BENJAMIN  GUINNESS 

most  genial  of  hosts  and 
most  loyal  of  friends 


236778 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

PREFACE  ix 


PART  I 

The  Geographical  Foundations  of  Russian 
Politics 

I.    THE  RUSSIAN  EMPIRE  3 

II.  THE  LESSON  OF  PHYSICAL  GEOGRAPHY    14 

III.  THE    LESSONS    OF    ECONOMIC     GEOG- 

RAPHY 28 

IV.  THE      GEOGRAPHICAL      DISTRIBUTION 

OF  RACES  37 

V.    THE  GEOGRAPHICAL  ORIENTATION  OF 

RUSSIAN   FOREIGN  POLITICS  43 

PART  II 

What  the  World  Owes  to  Russia 

VI.    RUSSIAN  VERSUS  GERMAN  CULTURE  51 

VII.    RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  DEMOCRACY  AND 

LIBERTY  61 

vii 


viii  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  pACK 

VIII.    RUSSIA    AS   THE    LIBERATOR   OF   OP- 
PRESSED NATIONALITIES  74 

IX.    RUSSIA      STANDS      FOR      PEACE      AND 

PROGRESS  82 

PART  III 

The  Great  Russian  Triumvirate 

X.    TURGENEV  AND  WESTERN  INFLUENCE    91 
XI.    TOLSTOY  THE  BYZANTINE  107 

XII.    DOSTOEVSKY   AND    THE   RELIGION    OF 

HUMAN  SUFFERING  118 

XIII.  THOUGHTS     ON     THE     RUSSIAN     LAN- 

GUAGE 124 

PART  IV 

Russian  Problems 

XIV.  THE  RESURRECTION  OF  POLAND  139 
XV.    THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  RUSSIAN  JEW         153 

XVI.    THE    FRENCH    REVOLUTION    AND    THE 

RUSSIAN  REVOLUTION  179 

XVII.    RUSSIAN  POLITICAL  EVILS  AND  THEIR 

REMEDIES  217 

XVIII.    THE  RUSSIAN  WAR  OF  LIBERATION  A 

HUNDRED  YEARS  AGO  224 

XIX.    RUSSIA   AND    GERMANY  231 


PREFACE 

THE  present  volume  is  not  a  mere  collec- 
lection  of  disconnected  articles,  of  dis- 
jecta membra,  on  the  Russian  Empire 
and  on  the  Russian  people.  Rather  is  it  an  at- 
tempt to  give  a  systematic  and  co-ordinated  sur- 
vey of  Russian  history  and  policy. 

In  the  first  part  I  have  tried  to  analyse  some- 
what more  consistently  than  has  been  done  by 
previous  authors  how  Russian  history  and  Rus- 
sian policy  are  rooted  in  definite  geographical 
conditions. 

In  the  second  part  I  have  tried  to  indicate  the 
inappreciable  debt  which  the  world  owes  to  the 
Russian  people. 

In  the  third  part  I  have  shown  how  the  ideals 
of  Russian  culture  have  found  adequate  ex- 
pression in  the  representative  masters  of  Rus- 
sian literature. 

In  the  fourth  part  I  have  dealt  with  the  two 
burning  questions  of  Russian  politics,  the  Polish 
problem  and  the  Jewish  problem. 

In  the  paper  on  the  abortive  Revolution- 


x  PREFACE 

ary  Movement  of  1905  I  have  examined  the 
difficulties  which  confronted  Russian  reform- 
ers. The  paper  was  written  ten  years  ago  in 
Moscow  under  the  direct  impression  of  the 
tragic  events  of  the  Russian  Annus  Mirabilis. 
I  have  analysed  the  causes  why  the  civil  war 
of  1905  failed  and  was  bound  to  fail,  and  I 
have  suggested  on  what  lines  any  future  reform- 
ing movement  is  likely  to  succeed.  I  have  not 
hesitated  to  reprint  those  pages,  not  only  be- 
cause I  was  repeatedly  urged  to  do  so  by  the 
late  Count  Tolstoy,  not  only  because  my  fore- 
casts were  verified  in  every  detail,  but  because 
those  pages  are  still  entirely  applicable  to  the 
present  situation.  The  difficulties  which  con- 
fronted the  Russian  Revolutionists  in  1905, 
will  still  confront  Russian  Reformers  in  the  po- 
litical reorganization  of  to-morrow.  The  reme- 
dies which  were  demanded  in  1905  are  still 
urgently  required  to-day. 

I  am  quite  aware  that  within  the  narrow  com- 
pass of  200  pages  I  have  only  been  able  to  touch 
the  fringe  of  a  huge  subject,  but  I  shall  have 
sufficiently  attained  my  purpose  if  I  have  suc- 
ceeded in  stimulating  some  of  my  readers  to 
think  for  themselves  on  those  fascinating  top- 
ics, and  if  I  have  succeeded  in  removing  some 


PREFACE  xi 

of  the  most  glaring  British  misconceptions  of 
a  wonderful  people  whose  fortunes  are  hence- 
forth closely  bound  up  with  our  own,  and  who 
are  destined  after  this  war  to  be  the  dominant 
influence  in  World  Politics. 

The  Hermitage,  Jedburgh 
November,  1915 


PART  I 


The  Geographical  Foundations 
of  Russian  Politics 


SSSSS^  £dinm 


CHAPTER  I:    INTRODUCTION 
THE  RUSSIAN  EMPIRE 


RUSSIA  is  not  a  country,  but  a  continent, 
extending  for  thousands  of  miles  in 
one  uninterrupted  expanse  (except  for 
the  break  of  the  Ural  Mountains)  from  Cen- 
tral Europe  to  the  Far  East,  and  from  the  ice- 
bound wastes  of  the  White  Sea  to  the  sub- 
tropical shores  of  the  Black  Sea  and  the  Caspian 
Sea.  Russia  is  not  a  nation,  but  a  bewildering 
conglomerate  of  nations,  speaking  every  lan- 
guage— Polish,  Finnish,  Roumanian,  Swedish, 
German — professing  every  form  of  religion — 
Pagan,   Buddhist,  Mahometan,  Greek  Ortho- 

3 


y^ 


4  GREAT  RUSSIA 

dox,  Roman  Catholic — with  every  degree  of 
civilization,  from  the  nomadic  semi-savage 
tribes  of  the  Steppes  to  the  progressive  Finns, 
with  their  Parliament  of  women  and  their  uni- 
versal popular  education. 

II 

The  first  and  most  important  fact  to  remember 
about  the  Russians  is  that  they  are,  with  the 
Chinese,  the  most  prolific  people  of  the  earth. 
Add  the  aggregate  population  of  Great  Britain, 
France,  Italy,  Spain,  Belgium,  Holland, 
Sweden,  and  Norway,  and  you  will  not  reach 
the  hundred  and  seventy-five  teeming  millions 
of  the  Russian  Empire.  And  that  population, 
notwithstanding  an  awful  death-rate,  notwith- 
standing plague  and  famine,  increases  auto- 
matically by  three  millions  a  year.  Every  year 
three-quarters  of  the  entire  population  of  Scot- 
land are  being  added  to  Russia.  In  twenty- 
five  years  Russia  will  number  two  hundred 
and  fifty  millions!  When  we  consider  that 
those  two  hundred  and  fifty  millions  will  by 
that  time  be  fully  equipped  with  every  instru- 
ment of  modern  civilization,  we  realize  that 
Russia  will  be  one  of  the  most  formidable 
world-forces,  for  good  or  evil,  before  the  first 


THE  RUSSIAN  EMPIRE  5 

half  of  this  century  has  run  its  course.  We 
realize  that  the  future  belongs,  not  to  England, 
or  to  France,  or  to  Germany,  but  to  Russia. 
After  generations  of  suffering,  the  Slav  is  at 
last  coming  into  his  inheritance. 

Ill 

The  vast  plains  of  Russia,  the  most  extensive 
in  the  planet,  include  three  parallel  zones — in 
the  north  the  forest  zone,  in  the  centre  the 
agricultural  zone — with  the  "black  earth"  of 
>r  wondrous  fertility — and  in  the  south  the 
waving  prairie  inhabited  by  the  Cossacks.  If 
we  add  to  those  three  zones  the  vineyards  of 
the  Crimea  and  of  the  Caucasus,  we  find  that 
the  soil  of  Russia  produces  every  form  of 
agricultural  wealth.  And  the  mineral  resources 
of  the  country  are  no  less  varied  and  no  less 
inexhaustible.  We  need  only  refer  to  the  coal- 
fields of  the  Donetz,  to  the  oil-fields  of  Baku, 
to  the  gold  and  silver  mines  of  the  Ural 
Mountains  and  of  Siberia.  If  to-day  Russia  is 
one  of  the  granaries  of  the  world,  to-morrow 
she  will  also  be  one  of  the  greatest  industrial 
areas. 

For  the  transport  of  her  agricultural  and  in- 
dustrial produce  Russia  possesses  not  only  sixty 


6  GREAT  RUSSIA 

thousand  miles  of  railroad,  but  what  is  vastly 
more  important — the  most  magnificent  water- 
ways of  Europe.  The  Russian  complains  that 
he  has  no  outlet  on  the  ocean,  that  all  his  seas 
are  inland  lakes :  the  Baltic,  the  Black  Sea,  the 
Caspian,  and  Lake  Baikal.  But  he  forgets  that 
he  possesses  the  Don,  the  Dnieper,  and  the  most 
glorious  river  of  the  world — the  Volga!  Let 
the  tourist  take  his  passage  at  Tver,  where  the 
river  becomes  navigable,  on  one  of  the  float- 
ing hotels  of  the  Kavkaz  and  Mercur  Steam- 
ship Company — Tver  is  only  eight  hours'  rail- 
way journey  from  Petrograd — and  let  him 
drift  in  an  eight  days'  journey  on  the  "Mother 
Volga"  down  to  the  Caspian  Sea,  and  he  will 
then  conceive  the  unrivalled  possibilities  of 
Russian  inland  commerce. 

IV 

It  is  true  that  a  large  proportion  of  the  Rus- 
sian Empire  has  not  yet  been  assimilated.  The 
alien  races — the  Catholic  Poles,  even  the  Ger- 
mans and  Finns,  the  Jews  and  Armenians — 
have  not  yet  been  won  over  by  the  conqueror. 
Still,  the  Russian  element  forms  the  enormous 
majority  of  the  population.  When  the  Gov- 
ernment gives  up  its  stupid  methods  of  com- 


THE  RUSSIAN  EMPIRE  7 

pulsion,  when  its  alliance  with  the  great  liberal 
Powers  of  the  West  will  be  spiritual  as  well  as 
political,  it  is  probable  that  the  process  of 
Russincation  will  proceed  at  a  very  rapid  pace. 
For  let  us  not  be  deceived  by  superficial  ap- 
pearances. The  Russian  race  possess  many  of 
the  characteristics  of  a  superior  and  imperial 
people.  They  have  survived  a  struggle  for  life 
of  ruthless  severity.  They  have  resisted  the 
continued  pressure  of  hunger,  war,  plague,  of 
a  cruel  climate,  and  a  more  cruel  Government. 
The  Russians  have  got  a  splendid  physique, 
they  have  a  capacity  of  endurance  which  is  sur- 
passed by  no  other  race.  And  although  they 
emerged  only  yesterday  from  barbarism,  they 
have  already  produced  giants  in  every  depart- 
ment of  Art,  of  Literature,  and  Philosophy — 
scientists  like  Mendeleieff,  philosophers  like 
Soloviov,  musicians  like  Tschaikowsky,  painters 
like  Verestchagin,  men  of  letters  like  Tolstoy 
and  Dostoevsky. 

V 

European  Russia  is  surrounded  by  an  indus- 
trial belt  in  the  west,  in  the  south,  and  in  the 
east.  But  in  the  meantime  Russia  remains 
pre-eminently    a    nation    of    peasants.     The 


8  GREAT  RUSSIA 

moujik  is  still  the  backbone  of  the  Empire.  He 
is  a  splendid  worker  when  he  is  given  a  chance, 
and  in  Siberia  and  Central  Asia  he  proves  an 
ideal  colonist.  It  is  true  that  technically  he  is 
still  a  bad  agriculturist.  He  is  ignorant.  He 
has  no  capital.  He  scratches  the  earth  with  his 
primitive  plough,  as  in  the  days  of  Abraham. 
But  enormous  progress  is  being  made,  and 
great  changes  are  impending.  The  Russian 
Government  is  instituting  gigantic  experiments 
in  land  reform,  which  our  own  land  reformers 
would  do  well  to  follow  very  closely.  Hitherto 
the  communal  system  of  property  seems  to 
have  proved  an  insurmountable  obstacle  to 
agricultural  progress.  That  form  of  collective 
primitive  agriculture  has  now  broken  down. 
v  The  ancient  institution  of  the  "mir,"  or  village 
community,  is  being  disintegrated.  Commu- 
nism is  giving  way  to  peasant  proprietorship 
and  social  co-operation. 

VI 

But  it  is  obvious  that  no  reform  of  any  kind 
will  be  carried  through  successfully  until  the 
methods  of  government  in  Russia  have  under- 
gone drastic  changes.  Those  hundred  and 
seventy  millions  are  still  badly  ruled.     In  the 


THE  RUSSIAN  EMPIRE  9 

first  place,  they  are  misgoverned  by  their 
spiritual  rulers.  The  Greek  Orthodox  Church, 
with  her  parish  priests,  or  white  clergy — who 
are  compelled  to  marry — with  her  hierarchy  of 
monks  and  bishops,  or  black  clergy — who  are 
forbidden  to  marry — remains  grossly  ignorant 
and  slothful,  and  maintains  the  people  in  sloth 
and  ignorance.  She  is  out  of  touch  with 
modern  life,  and  continues  in  abject  mental 
submission  to  a  despotic  State. 

Nor  do  the  Russian  people  fare  much  better 
with  their  temporal  rulers.:  The  Tsar  is  the 
nominal  head  of  the  Empire.  But  the  reality 
of  power  is  vested  in  an  irresponsible  bureau- 
cracy, corrupt  by  tradition,  and  what  is  worse, 
corrupt  by  necessity,  because  they  are  badly 
paid,  because  despotism  must  needs  breed  cor- 
ruption, and  because  the  huge  distances  from 
St.  Petersburg  make  supervision  and  responsi- 
bility impossible.  The  immortal  comedy  of 
Gogol,  "The  Inspector-General,"  denouncing 
the  abuses  of  the  provincial  bureaucracy,  re- 
mains partly  true  to  this  day.  No  doubt  since 
the  heroic  rising  of  1905  the  Russian  people 
have  received  representative  institutions;  but 
the  Duma  is  only  a  beginning.  No  reforms 
can  be  fruitful  unless  they  are  attended  by  a 


10  GREAT  RUSSIA 

large  measure  of  Home  Rule  in  Finland,  in 
Poland,  in  Trans-Caucasia,  in  Little  Russia, 
and  unless  they  are  attended  by  an  even  larger 
measure  of  local  self-government,  and  last,  not 
least,  unless  they  are  attended  by  a  concession 
of  religious  liberty — which  has  ever  been  the 
foundation  of  political  liberty.  The  main  con- 
dition of  any  future  progress  in  Russia  is  that 
the  Edict  of  Toleration  of  1905  shall  cease  to 
be  a  dead  letter. 

VII 

Unfortunately  for  the  prospects  of  reform 
the  ideals  and  the  activity  of  the  Government 
were  still  being  diverted  before  the  war,  by  the 
menace  of  the  German  Peril  and  the  fascination 
of  the  Far  East,  from  the  pressing  home-prob- 
lems. cWhat  the  Russian  people  really  want 
are  better  roads,  more  railways,  better  housing, 
better  sanitation,  better  schools,  a  more  liberal 
Church,  a  more  liberal  administration.  /  But 
instead  of  the  activities  of  the  Government 
being  turned  in  that  direction,  the  huge  revenue 
of  the  Empire  had  to  be  largely  spent  on  in- 
creasing an  already  huge  and  unwieldy  army, 
and  the  political  energies  of  the  ruling  classes 
were  being  devoted  to  the  ambitious  and  peril- 


THE  RUSSIAN  EMPIRE  n 

ous  schemes  of  conquest  in  Persia,  Mongolia, 
and  Manchuria.  Only  ten  years  ago  the  jingo 
policy  brought  humiliating  disaster  to  the  Rus- 
sian arms.  The  Government  quickly  forgot 
the  awful  lesson,  and  soon  returned  to  the  evil 
of  its  ways.  They  were  "strangling"  Persia. 
They  were  preparing  to  annex  Mongolia  and 
part  of  Manchuria.  There  lay  the  danger  in 
the  immediate  future.  The  pressing  necessi- 
ties of  national  defence,  a  crushing  military 
expenditure,  a  false  and  obsolete  political  phi- 
losophy, the  imperialism  of  the  governing  class 
and  the  spirtual  despotism  of  the  Orthodox 
Church,  those  were  before  the  war  the  great 
obstacles  in  the  way  of  the  moral  and  intellec- 
tual enfranchisement  of  the  Russian  people. 

VIII 

We  have  every  reason  to  hope  that  those  ob- 
stacles will  be  finally  removed  on  the  con- 
clusion of  peace,  and  that  the  war  will  prove  a 
war  of  liberation  for  the  victorious  Russian 
people  as  it  will  prove  a  war  of  liberation  even 
for  the  vanquished  Germans.  For  this  war  is 
pre-eminently  not  a  dynastic  war  or  a  war  of 
conquest,  it  is  a  national  and  a  democratic  war. 
And  it  is  almost  a  law  of  Russian  history  that  a 


12  GREAT  RUSSIA 

national  and  democratic  war  has  ever  acted  as  a 
revolutionary  force  in  Russian  politics. 

( 1 )  The  liberal  era  of  Speranski,  perhaps  the 
most  picturesque  and  the  most  mysterious  per- 
sonality in  Russian  annals,  followed  the  na- 
tional war  against  Napoleon. 

(2)  The  liberation  of  the  serfs  and  the 
epoch-making  reform  of  Alexander  II  followed 
the  Crimean  War. 

(3)  Drastic  reforms  had  been  decided  upon 
after  the  Russian-Turkish  War  of  1878,  and 
would  have  been  granted  but  for  the  insensate 
murder  of  the  Liberator  Tsar. 

(4)  The  establishment  of  Parliamentary 
Government  followed  the  Russo-Japanese  War. 

The  present  war  will  prove  no  exception. 
The  victory  of  the  Allies  will  mean  the  end  of 
militarism  and  the  end  of  militarism  will  for 
the  first  time  release  the  greater  part  of  the 
huge  financial  resources  of  the  Russian  Empire 
for  the  economic  development  of  the  country 
and  for  the  education  of  the  people.  And  the 
victory  of  the  Allies  will  also  mean  the  end  of 
the  baneful  activities  of  German  reaction  and 
•of  the  German  bureaucrats  of  the  Baltic 
provinces,  activities  which,  as  we  shall  prove  in 
a  subsequent  chapter,  have  been  the  incubus 


THE  RUSSIAN  EMPIRE  13 

of  Russian  history.  It  is  inevitable  that  the 
Russian  Government,  closely  identified  as  it  is 
with  the  great  liberal  Powers  of  the  West, 
France  and  Great  Britain,  must  come  under 
their  political  and  moral  influence.  We  may, 
therefore,  confidently  predict  that  British  and 
French  culture  will  blend  with  and  permeate 
Russian  culture,  and  will  be  the  leaven  of 
Russian  politics  for  the  next  generation. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  LESSON  OF  PHYSICAL 
GEOGRAPHY  * 


RUSSIA  is  the  classic  land  for  geo- 
graphers. Nowhere  else  have  geo- 
graphical conditions  left  a  more  in- 
delible imprint.  Nowhere  else  have  men  felt 
more  deeply  the  all-pervading  influences  of 
physical  surroundings,  of  climate  and  of  race. 
There  are  some  countries,  like  England,  where 
man  has  conquered  Nature,  where  Nature  has 
become  the  benevolent  and  ministering  servant 
of  man.  There  are  other  countries,  like  Russia, 
where  it  is  Nature  that  always  threatens  to  en- 
slave man.  In  few  other  countries  have  men 
been  compelled  to  submit  to  that  physical  des- 

*  I  do  not  in  the  least  pretend  to  give  in  the  present 
chapter  an  "explanation"  of  Modern  Russia.  I  only  de- 
sire to  single  out  one  particular  factor  which  I  think  of 
the  highest  importance.  Whilst  not  underrating  the  other 
factors,  and  least  of  all  the  religious  factor,  I  think  it  de- 
sirable to  draw  attention  to  and  to  emphasize  one  essential 
element  in  the  complex  Russian  problem  which  is  being 
constantly  ignored. 

14 


PHYSICAL  GEOGRAPHY  15 

potism  with  a  more  passive  resignation,  the 
resignation  of  a  Tolstoy  so  representative  of 
the  race.  And  in  no  other  country  has  Nature 
given  the  lie  more  cruelly  and  more  emphati- 
cally to  the  noble  dreams  of  idealists.  Idealists 
may  dream  their  dreams,  proclaim  their  systems, 
and  claim  their  reforms.  But  the  great  natural, 
economic,  climatic  forces  in  Russia  continue  to 
follow  their  immovable  course,  heedless  of  sys- 
tems and  reforms.  It  would  seem  as  if  the 
political  destiny  of  Russia  had  been  written 
not  in  the  book  of  philosophy,  but  in  the  stern 
and  sibylline  book  of  Nature;  it  has  followed 
the  bend  of  rivers  and  the  curves  of  isothermic 
lines;  and  one  guesses  its  mystery,  and  one 
catches  its  meaning  more  surely  and  more 
easily,  by  listening  to  the  murmur  of  forest  and 
steppe  than  by  listening  to  the  most  plausible 
theories  of  revolutionists. 

II 

In  this  connexion,  and  to  illustrate  my  meaning 
from  the  outset,  and  to  indicate  what  I  am 
driving  at,  I  would  like  to  point  out  the  utter 
futility  and  folly  of  most  newspaper  comments 
and  discussions  on  the  political  situation  in 
Russia.     In  speculating  on  the  probable  course 


16  GREAT  RUSSIA 

of  Russian  policy,  journalists  are  constantly 
reasoning  on  the  childish  assumption  that  the 
ultimate  success  or  failure  of  political  and  social 
reform  must  entirely  depend  on  the  will,  weak 
or  strong,  just  or  wicked,  enlightened  or  ob- 
scured, of  some  one  man  or  group  of  men,  the 
Tsar  or  the  Grand  Dukes,  their  supporters  or 
opponents.  If  Russia  could  only  be  got  rid 
of  these  Grand  Dukes,  and  "of  a  few  corrupt 
officials,"  then  all  would  be  right.  Not  only 
do  they  forget  that  behind  the  Tsar  and  the 
Grand  Dukes,  and  the  high  court  officials, 
there  is  the  large  army  of  the  bureaucracy,  mil- 
lions strong,  with  their  immense  power,  with 
their  vested  interests,  who  are  capable  of  par- 
alyzing and  neutralizing  all  the  efforts  of  the 
most  enlightened  rulers,  and  of  wrecking  all 
the  programmes  of  reform  if  they  so  choose, 
but  they  also  forget  that  behind  both  autocracy 
and  bureaucracy  there  is  a  factor  infinitely 
more  important  still,  and  that  is  the  passive 
resistance  or  active  co-operation  of  one  hundred 
and  fifty  millions  of  peasants,  whom  we  totally 
ignore  in  our  calculations,  as  if  they  were  abso- 
lutely of  no  account.  Unfortunately  for  our 
speculations  and  calculations,  these  one  hun- 
dred and  fifty  millions,  whether  active  or  pas- 


PHYSICAL  GEOGRAPHY  17 

sive,  must  be  taken  into  account,  as  the  ulti- 
mate success  of  any  scheme  of  reform  neces- 
sarily depends  upon  them.  It  may  not  be 
true  that  the  people  have  generally  the  Gov- 
ernment they  deserve,  and  that  they  deserve  the 
Government  they  have;  or  to  use  the  language 
of  Carlyle,  that  the  rights  of  a  people  are  equiv- 
alent to  its  mights,  its  needs  and  aspirations. 
But  in  a  country  like  Russia,  the  needs  and  the ; 
mights  of  the  people  cannot  be  ignored,  and 
those  needs  and  mights  are  largely  determined 
by  the  conditions  under  which  they  live,  and 
those  conditions  largely  resolve  themselves  into 
facts  of  climate  and  distance,  of  soil  and  of 
race. 

Ill 

One  single  illustration  applicable  to  the  pres- 
ent situation  will  explain  better  than  any  argu- 
ment the  interdependence  between  climate,  eco- 
nomics and  politics.  All  reformers  are  agreed 
that  the  most  urgent  need  of  the  Russian  peo- 
ple, after  the  introduction  of  religious  freedom, 
is  the  establishment  of  universal  popular  edu- 
cation. So  vital  is  that  need,  so  strongly  is  it 
felt  that,  as  far  back  as  the  sixties,  Tolstoy  for 
several  years  relinquished  his  literary  activities 


18  GREAT  RUSSIA 

and  improvised  himself  a  primary  schoolmaster. 
But  Tolstoi  was  driven  by  his  pedagogical  ex- 
periment to  see  the  futility  of  all  the  theories 
and  reforms  propounded  by  doctrinaire  pub- 
licists. The  doctrinaire  publicists  imagine  that 
universal  compulsory  education  could  be  intro- 
duced into  Russia  by  a  stroke  of  the  autocratic 
pen,  and  they  blame  a  reactionary  bureaucracy 
and  an  obscurantist  church  for  keeping  the  peo- 
ple in  darkness.  But  the  bureaucracy  is  really 
much  less  responsible  than  theorists  imagine  for 
the  backwardness  of  Russian  education.  In  a 
country  where  winter  lasts  for  seven  months, 
where  for  those  interminable  winter  months  the 
plains  are  covered  with  a  thick  shroud  of  snow, 
where  roads  are  few  and  bad,  in  a  country  which 
is  further  sparsely  inhabited  and  where  the 
izbas  of  the  moujik  are  as  scattered  as  the  farms 
of  the  Dutchmen  on  the  South  African  veld — 
you  cannot  possibly  have  primary  schools  as  in 
Great  Britain  or  France.  Even  the  most  pro- 
gressive Russian  Government  could  not  afford 
a  schoolmaster  for  every  twelve  families.  It 
could  not  even  establish  itinerant  schoolmasters 
as  is  done  in  the  Scottish  Highlands.  For  the 
Highlands  are  much  better  provided  with  roads, 
and  they  are  more  thickly  inhabited  than  many 


PHYSICAL  GEOGRAPHY  19 

parts  of  Russia.  On  the  other  hand  you  can- 
not compel  little  Russian  children  to  tramp  in 
the  depth  of  winter  for  ten  miles  to  the  nearest 
school  centre.  In  other  words  the  diffusion  of 
popular  education  is  not  mainly  a  question  of 
political  development,  but  of  economic  develop- 
ment. Again  it  is  largely  a  question  of  cli- 
matte,  of  good  roads  and  of  density  of  popula- 
tion. 

Let  us  then  constantly  keep  in  mind  those 
physical  conditions  which  are  amongst  the 
fundamental  factors  of  the  political  problem. 
It  would  be  as  idle  to  ignore  those  geographical 
factors  as  it  would  be  to  ignore  the  intellectual 
and  spiritual  factors.  Without  an  accurate  and 
minute  investigation  of  the  environment,  it  is 
as  futile  to  speculate  on  the  relative  strength 
of  the  forces  of  liberty  and  reaction  as  it  would 
be  to  speculate  on  the  resistance  of  the  Forth 
Bridge  or  the  Tay  Bridge,  without  examining 
the  strength  of  the  foundations,  without  study- 
ing the  special  properties  of  iron  and  steel  as 
well  as  the  general  laws  of  dynamics. 

IV 

The  first  feature  and  the  essential  fact  in  the 
physical   geography  of  Russia  is   the  infinite 


20  GREAT  RUSSIA 

plain,  the  uniform  steppe  and  prairie,  without 
any  other  undulations  than  the  tumuli,  or  pre- 
historic tombs,  or  the  high  banks  of  streams,  or 
the  insignificant  hills  which  separate  the  basins 
of  the  enormous,  slow,  aimless  rivers.  The 
chain  of  the  Ural  Mountains  which  separates 
Asiatic  Russia  from  European  Russia  hardly 
breaks  the  continuity  of  the  plain.  The  slopes 
of  the  Ural  are  a  passage  rather  than  a  barrier, 
and  between  the  last  slopes  of  the  Ural  and  the 
Caspian  Sea  there  opens  a  gate  of  three  hun- 
dred miles  in  width  which  has  always  been  the 
highway  of  invaders  and  marauders. 

And  this  unity  of  the  infinite  plain  is  still 
rendered  more  striking  through  the  unity  of  cli- 
mate. In  summer  the  same  Continental  cli- 
mate reigns  all  over  the  Empire,  the  same  in- 
tense heat  relaxes  and  enervates  the  inhabit- 
ants of  Lake  Ladoga  in  the  north  and  the  in- 
habitants of  the  Caspian  shores  in  the  south. 
In  winter  the  same  shroud  of  snow  buries  the 
whole  Russian  Continent  from  Poland  to 
Siberia.  The  Sea  of  Azov  and  the  northern 
Caspian  Sea  are  frozen  as  well  as  the  Gulf  of 
Finland.  And  the  traveller  might  drive  and 
glide  in  his  sledge  in  a  straight  line  for  six 


PHYSICAL  GEOGRAPHY  21 

thousand  miles  from  the  Baltic  Sea  to  the  Pa- 
cific Ocean,  from  Archangel  to  Astrakhan. 

V 

Now,  my  point  is  that  this  single  feature  of 
the  physical  geography  of  Russia  has  deter- 
mined beforehand  the  whole  history  of  the 
Russian  people.  We  are  reminded  of  the  ad- 
mirable sonnet  of  Wordsworth  on  the  subjuga- 
tion of  Switzerland  by  Napoleon : 

Two  Voices  are  there;  one  is  of  the  sea, 
One  of  the  mountains;  each  a  mighty  voice; 
In  both  from  age  to  age  Thou  didst  rejoice, 
They  were  thy  chosen  music,  Liberty. 

If  it  be  true  that  the  voices  of  sea  and  mountain 
are  the  two  mighty  voices  of  Liberty,  on  the 
other  it  is  even  more  obvious  that  the  plain 
has  ever  been  the  arena  and  refuge  of  despotism. 
The  levelling  of  the  soil  seems  to  be  significant 
and  symbolical  of  the  levelling  of  men.  Ernest 
Renan  has  told  us  that  the  desert  is  mono- 
theistic, i.e.  that  the  uniformity  of  the  desert 
suggests  and  determines  a  belief  in  the  unity 
of  God.  In  the  same  way,  one  might  assert 
that  the  plain  is  monarchic  and  autocratic.     In 


22  GREAT  RUSSIA 

all  times  and  everywhere  the  plain  has  invited 
the  invader,  and  in  order  to  repel  and  expel 
that  foreign  invader  the  inhabitants  have  had 
to  submit  to  the  protecting  yoke  of  a  master; 
they  have  had  to  accept  a  military  and  cen- 
tralized monarchy. 

Examine  on  the  map  the  few  and  scattered 
historic  cities  of  Russia — Moscow,  Novgorod 
the  Great,  Nijni  Novgorod,  Kiev,  Kazan — 
generally  situated  on  the  border  of  the  shelter- 
ing forest,  or  at  the  mouth  or  on  the  banks  of 
rivers.  The  new  city  or  "nov  gorod"  is  gen- 
erally situated  on  the  lower  bank  (nijni),  but 
the  old  city  is  almost  invariably  situated  on  a 
height,  round  a  Kreml.  Each  one  of  those 
old  cities  dominating  the  plain  appears  to  us 
like  a  sentinel  who  watches  and  like  a  strong- 
hold which  protects,  and  that  Kremlin — which 
is  both  an  acropolis  and  a  capitol,  which  is  at 
once  a  fortress,  a  church,  and  a  city — tells  us 
by  its  aspect  of  the  violent  destinies  of  the  in- 
habitants. The  whole  of  Russian  history  is 
one  continued  effort  to  drive  out  foreign  inva- 
sion.'  In  everlasting  succession  on  each  fron- 
tier arises  a  new  enemy — Tatars  of  Kazan  and 
of  Crimea,  Khirgiz  of  the  Volga,  Cossacks 
of  the  Steppe,  Turks,  Poles,  Lithuanians,  Ger- 


PHYSICAL  GEOGRAPHY  23 

mans,  Swedes,  towards  the  sduth  and  the  west 
— the  external  peril  has  never  ceased. 

VI 

Speaking  of  the  European  coalition  against 
France  in  1792,  Joseph  de  Maistre  has  been 
able  to  say  that  France  could  only  be  saved  by 
a  Reign  of  Terror.  With  how  much  more 
reason  might  one  affirm  that  Russia  could  only 
be  saved  by  an  autocracy?  It  is  Ivan  the  Ter- 
rible, Peter  and  Catherine  the  Great  who  have 
been  the  cruel  and  stern  master-builders  of  the 
Russian  people,  the  "gatherers"  of  the  Russian 
soil.* 

It  is  hard  for  a  Briton,  who  has  an  instinctive 
worship  and  almost  a  superstition  for  liberty, 
to  get  reconciled  with  the  principle  of  des- 
potism. It  is  difficult  for  him  not  to  see  in 
that  principle  something  diabolical,  the  source 
of  all  moral  and  political  evil.  And  most  diffi- 
cult of  all,  most  repugnant  to  his  feelings,  is  it 
to  admit  that  this  abhorred  autocracy  can  ever 
have  been  the  very  condition  of  the  salvation 
of  the  country.  But  let  us  not  forget  that  in 
the  life  of  nations  the  principle  of  authority,' 
as  long  as  it  is  accepted  by  the  people,  and  as 

*  See  the  Russian  writings  of  Danilevski. 


24  GREAT  RUSSIA 

long  as  it  rests  on  a  moral  or  spiritual  basis, 
may  be  as  necessary  and  therefore  as  legitimate 
as  the  principle  of  liberty.  Let  us  not  forget 
that  even  in  our  own  history  two  of  the  most 
decisive  epochs  have  been  the  military  dictator- 
ship of  Cromwell  and  the  civil  dictatorship  of 
Pitt.  Let  us  not  forget  that  the  Romans — i.e. 
the  nation  who,  of  all  ancient  nations,  have 
been  the  most  successful  in  the  practice  of  free- 
dom and  of  self-government,  did  never  hesitate 
to  appeal  to  such  dictatorship  whenever  the 
country  was  in  danger.  Salus  populi  suprema 
lex. 

VII 

Now  in  Russia  for  centuries  the  country  has 
always  been  in  danger.  Hannibal  has  always 
been  at  the  gates  of  Rome.  Tatars  and  Poles 
have  always  threatened  the  gates  of  Moscow. 
And  therefore  fatally  despotism  had  to  be  per- 
petual. Dura  lex  sed  lex:  it  was  a  great  evil, 
but  a  necessary  one. 

Let  us  suppose  for  one  moment  that  the  Rus- 
sians had  adopted  another  form  of  government, 
and  had  remained  loyal  to  the  republican  princi- 
ple which  we  see  prevailing  in  the  most  ancient 
commonwealths    of   Pskof,    Viatka,    and    My 


PHYSICAL  GEOGRAPHY  25 

Lord  Novgorod  the  Great.  What  would  have 
happened  if  Russia,  instead  of  submitting  to 
the  iron  hand  of  the  Grand  Dukes  of  Moscow, 
had  risen  against  them,  and  if  republican  free- 
dom had  triumphed"? 

The  reply  to  that  question  is  written  in  the 
whole  history  of  Poland  which  is  inseparable 
from  that  of  Russia.  In  the  life  and  death 
struggle  between  the  two  great  Slav  nations, 
the  Poles  seemed  to  have  every  advantage: 
they  were  a  race  admirably  gifted,  brilliant, 
clever,  proud,  and  bold.  They  lived  in  close 
proximity  of  the  centres  of  civilization,  in  com- 
munion of  sympathy  and  interest  with  West- 
ern Europe.  They  were  inspired  with  a  pas- 
sionate love  for  independence.  And  yet  it  was 
Tartarized  and  barbarized  Russia  that  tri- 
umphed, it  was  civilized  Poland  which  was 
crushed  and  blotted  from  the  very  map  of 
Europe.  Poland  perished  through  freedom, 
through  the  abuse  of  the  liberum  veto  of  the 
elective  principle.  She  perished  because,  in 
the  supreme  hour  of  danger,  the  Poles  did  not 
rally  around  their  leaders,  because  they  did  not 
make  to  their  Government  the  sacrifice  of  their 
anarchist  instincts.  Russia,  on  the  contrary, 
made  that  sacrifice;  she  trusted  to  the  sword 


26  GREAT  RUSSIA 

of  her  princes;  she  allowed  herself  to  be  saved 
by  despotism.  "Let  Poland  perish  rather  than 
surrender  the  privileges  of  a  free  aristocracy  of 
the  Schlachta !"  seems  to  have  been  the  guiding 
principle  of  the  Poles.  "The  safety  of  the 
country  is  the  supreme  law  "  remained  the  motto 
of  the  Muscovites. 

VIII 

Let  us,  therefore,  take  care  not  to  simplify 
unduly  the  tragedy  of  humanity  by  rigid  ad- 
herence to  a  few  doctrinaire  principles.  By 
all  means  let  us  proclaim  that  in  our  modern 
industrial  community,  liberty  with  all  its  risks 
is  infinitely  preferable  to  despotism  with  all  its 
security/  But  do  not  let  us  forget  the  fatality 
of  the  past.  Let  us  remember  that  autocracy 
is  not  a  mere  baneful  accident  in  the  annals  of 
Russia,  a  system  born  of  brutal  force  and 
which  must  perish  by  brutal  force,  a  despotism 
only  supported  by  exile  and  by  Cossacks,  and 
only  tempered  by  Nihilism  and  by  assassination. 
As  I  said  at  the  beginning  of  this  chapter,  al- 
though nations  may  not  necessarily  have  the 
Government  they  deserve,  and  deserve  the  gov- 
ernment they  have,  yet  when  a  government  has 
I  succeeded  in  lasting  for  generations,  it  thereby 


PHYSICAL  GEOGRAPHY  27 

clearly  shows  that  it  must  be  adapted  to  the 
needs  of  and  in  conformity  with  the  aspirations 
of  the  inhabitants.  Now  autocracy  in  Russia 
has  endured  for  centuries ;  it  has  survived  every 
revolution.  Individual  Tsars  have  been  sup- 
pressed, Peter  III,  Paul  I,  Alexander  II,  have 
been  murdered.  The  institution  itself  could 
not  be  suppressed.  In  times  of  national  dis- 
turbance and  national  distress  it  has  always  ap- 
peared to  the  people,  rightly  or  wrongly,  as  the 
supreme  refuge.  It  has  owed  its  existence  not 
to  chance,  but  to  necessity.  And  this  necessity 
seems  so  obvious,  so  imperative  to  every  Rus- 
sian who  knows  his  history,  that  all  Slavophiles, 
even  though  their  tendencies  were  liberal,  as  in 
the  case  of  Aksakov  and  Yourii  Samarine,  have 
upheld  the  autocracy,  the  "Samoderjavie,"  as 
the  corner-stone  of  the  political  structure.* 

*  In  the  course  of  an  interview  with  Tolstoy,  the  Russian 
prophet  repeatedly  emphasized  to  .  me  the  importance  of 
studying  the  "Slavophile"  theories,  in  order  to  understand 
the  present  situation  in  Russia. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  LESSONS  OF  ECONOMIC 
GEOGRAPHY 


S 


UCH  are  the  teachings  of  physical 
geography.  Let  us  consider  what  are 
the  lessons  of  economic  geography. 


Leaving  aside  the  frozen  marshes  of  the  ex- 
treme north  only  inhabited  by  the  Laplander 
and  the  reindeer,  and  the  salt  deserts  of  the  ex- 
treme south  only  crossed  by  the  nomadic  tribes 
and  the  camel,  European  Russia  is  divided  into 
three  zones  or  regions  (see  map  facing  page 
three) :  the  region  of  primeval  forests  in  the 
north,  the  region  of  the  grassy  steppes  or  prairies 
in  the  south,  and  the  intermediate  region  of 
arable  land,  that  famous  "black  soil"  of  inex- 
haustible fertility,  which  it  is  only  necessary  to 
scratch  for  the  harvest  to  burst  out  as  by  en- 
chantment.    Although  those  three  regions  are 

clearly    characterized    and    distinct,    they   are 

28 


ECONOMIC  GEOGRAPHY         29 

nevertheless  mutually  interdependent.  The 
dwellers  of  the  forest  need  the  produce  of  the 
black  soil — the  granary  of  Russia.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  inhabitants  of  the  agricultural 
plain  need  the  fuel  and  the  building  materials 
of  the  forest.  Coal  and  stone  are  generally 
wanting.  All  Russian  houses  in  the  country 
are  built  in  wood,  and  it  has  been  calculated 
that  all  the  Russian  villages  are  destroyed  by 
fire  every  twenty  years. 

And  still  more  does  the  plain  need  the  mois- 
ture of  the  forest,  without  which  the  droughts 
and  famines  which  at  present  are  only  a  peri- 
odical scourge  of  Russia  would  be  her  perma- 
nent curse.  And,  finally,  the  grassy  steppe  or 
prairie  is  the  "hinterland"  of  the  black  soil. 
Not  only  does  the  arable  land  encroach  every 
year  on  the  steppe,  but  without  the  possession 
of  that  "hinterland"  the  inhabitants  of  the 
plain,  as  in  the  legendary  days  of  the  Cossacks, 
would  have  been  always  at  the  mercy  of  incur- 
sions and  invasions. 

Owing  to  those  three  zones  Russia  is  a  huge 
agricultural  community,  distinct  from  indus- 
trial and  commercial  Europe;  it  is  an  Eastern 
Europe  of  wheat  and  wood  distinct  from  the 
Western  Europe  of  iron  and  stone.     The  peas- 


30  GREAT  RUSSIA 

antry  constitute  80  to  85  per  cent,  of  the  total 
population. 

No  doubt  in  the  last  generation  the  existence 
of  prodigious  mineral  wealth  has  been  revealed 
in  the  centre,  in  Poland,  in  the  Donetz,  in  the 
Ural.  The  industrial  exploitation  of  these 
regions  has  begun  and  very  rapidly  developed, 
partly  through  the  enterprise  of  Belgian  en- 
gineers. But  for  ages  to  come  the  industrial 
production  of  Russia  will  scarcely  meet  the  de- 
mand of  the  home  market.  Russia  will  con- 
^-4^'tinue  to  buy  from  the  foreigner  and  will  remain 
an  agricultural  nation,  and  one  of  the  granaries 
of  the  world. 

II 

Now  in  all  countries  and  in  all  times  an  agri- 
cultural, non-industrial,  non-commercial  nation 
is  essentially  conservative,  almost  blindly  re- 
spectful of  all  traditions  and  all  authorities. 
Its  political  progress  is  much  slower,  even 
though  it  may  be  safer.  But  in  Russia  the 
peasantry  are  incomparably  more  conservative 
than  anywhere  else.  In  the  first  place  they  are 
more  religious,  or,  in  the  opinion  of  doctrinaires, 
more  superstitious.  For  centuries  they  have 
identified   themselves   with   the   cause   of   the 


ECONOMIC  GEOGRAPHY         31 

Greek  Orthodox  Church.  In  the  Russian  lan- 
guage the  same  word  means  peasant  and  Chris- 
tian: krestianine.  For  centuries  the  Russian 
peasant  has  in  turn  repelled  the  Mohammedan 
invasion  of  Tartars,  the  Catholic  invasion  of 
Poles,  the  Protestant  invasion  of  Teutons,  the 
freethinking  invasion  of  Jews.  To  the  Rus- 
sian peasant,  and  mainly  owing  to  the  geo- 
graphical position  of  the  country,  nationality 
and  religion  are  synonymous  terms.  Religious 
unity  has  been  the  foundation  of  political  unity. 
The  Pravoslavie,  or  orthodoxy,  has  become  the 
second  principle  in  the  Slavophile  Trinity, 
and  even  the  liberals  who  reject  a  State  Church 
believe  in  a  National  Church. 

But,  in  addition  to  this  religious  cause  of  the 
conservatism  of  the  peasantry,  all  physical  con- 
ditions seem  to  neutralize  and  check  political 
movements.  Nature  herself  seems  to  conspire 
against  political  conspirators  and  seems  to  de- 
feat their  schemes:  climate,  the  enormous  dis- 
tances and  the  difficulties  of  communication, 
the  absence  of  roads,  the  scarcity  of  cities,  ex- 
plained by  the  absence  of  a  middle  class — 
which  is  itself  explained  by  the  primitive  con- 
ditions of  trade  and  industry — all  these  causes 
are  in  the  way  of  political  agitation. 


32  GREAT  RUSSIA 

III 

To  understand  the  radical  differences  of  the 
conditions  of  life  in  Britain  and  in  Russia, 
compare  a  British  village  with  a  Russian  vil- 
lage. The  British  village  appears  to  us  as  a 
highly  differentiated  political  organism  with  its 
hierarchy  of  classes,  its  division  of  social  labour : 
at  the  summit  a  small  aristocratic  community 
of  landed  proprietors  presided  over  by  the  lord 
of  the  manor  or  the  local  magnate;  an  inter- 
mediate middle  class  of  farmers  and  trades- 
people led  by  the  clergyman  and  the  schoolmas- 
ter; at  the  base  a  democracy  of  artizans  and 
farm  labourers:  from  the  highest  to  the  lowest 
rung  of  the  social  ladder,  an  intense  political 
and  religious  life,  which  is  favoured  by  the  close 
proximity  of  the  town,  the  continuous  inter- 
change between  town  and  country,  the  rivalry 
of  sects,  the  grouping  of  parties,  the  establish- 
ment of  clubs  and  societies  for  the  enlighten- 
ment and  diversion  of  the  inhabitants. 

Now  practically  none  of  these  conditions  ex- 
ist in  the  Russian  village.  There  is  no  ruling 
class.  Estates  are  too  scattered,  too  wide 
apart  to  render  social  relations  possible.  The 
landowner,  if  he  is  rich,  will  spend  his  income 


ECONOMIC  GEOGRAPHY         33 

in  the  Russian  capital  or  in  European  health 
or  pleasure  resorts ;  for  life  is  so  dreary,  solitude 
is  so  oppressive,  winters  are  so  long  that  noth- 
ing except  a  high  sense  of  duty  could  induce 
the  magnate  to  reside.  If  he  is  poor,  and  com- 
pelled to  remain  on  his  estate,  he  will  vegetate 
in  the  most  lamentable  intellectual  isolation. 
The  clergy  are  demoralized  by  their  bureau- 
cratic subjection,  by  their  ignorance  and  pov- 
erty, and  have  very  little  moral  influence  over 
the  peasants.  There  is  no  middle  class,  for 
either  trade  does  not  exist  or  is  in  the  hands 
of  the  Jews  and  the  Germans.  The  peasantry, 
absolutely  abandoned  to  themselves,  are  with- 
out any  contact  with  civilization.  Isolated 
from  the  city,  riveted  to  the  soil,  nearly  all  il- 
literate, the  din  and  turmoil  of  life  only  reaches 
them  as  a  distant  murmur.  I  do  not  mean  to 
say  that  these  peasants  are  by  any  means  dead 
to  political  life.  On  the  contrary,  the  Rus- 
sians have  a  much  healthier  political  and  demo- 
cratic instinct  than  the  Germans,  they  possess 
a  very  active  local  government,  and  that  local 
government,  represented  by  the  "Mir,"  or  vil- 
lage community,  and  the  "Zemstvo,"  or  County 
Council,  may  even  be  said  to  be  by  far  the  most 
original  and  interesting  of  Russian  institutions. 


34  GREAT  RUSSIA 

But  the  activities  of  the  "Mir"  and  of  the 
"Zemstvo"  are  above  all  of  an  economic  and 
administrative  order.  They  do  not  extend  be- 
yond the  border  of  the  village.  They  do  not 
free  the  peasant  from  his  intellectual  isolation. 

IV 

To  imagine  that  those  one  hundred  and 
twenty  millions  of  Russian  peasants,  thus  riv- 
eted to  the  soil,  thus  living  under  the  pressure 
of  poverty,  in  ignorance  and  isolation,  should 
be  mature  for  revolutionary  Utopias,  seems  to 
me  to  be  the  wildest  of  dreams.  However 
prodigiously  fertile  the  Russian  soil  may  be, 
and  however  gifted  the  Russian  people,  politi- 
cal discipline  does  not  grow  in  a  day  like  the 
grass  of  the  steppe,  it  is  not  a  plant  without 
roots  in  the  past,  in  the  traditions  and  the  man- 
ners of  the  people.  No  doubt  the  peasantry 
may  be  got  to  rise  in  some  bloody  "jacquerie." 
They  might  be  drawn  into  some  agrarian  revo- 
lution— like  the  Pougatchef  revolt  in  the 
eighteenth  century — which  would  satisfy  their 
craving  for  possessing  and  extending  the  soil 
they  cultivate.  But  the  hunger  for  land  once 
satisfied,  the  peasantry  would  again  become 
conservative,  like  the  French  peasant  proprietor 


ECONOMIC  GEOGRAPHY         35 

after  the  French  Revolution,  and  so  far  from 
joining  any  mere  "intellectual"  revolution,  they 
would  dread  such  a  revolution  as  a  possible  re- 
action and  as  a  menace  to  their  newly  acquired 
rights. 


No  doubt  the  political  awakening  of  the  rural 
masses  is  coming.  Popular  instruction  is 
spreading.  Proprietors  will  be  induced  more 
and  more  to  reside  on  their  estates.  Religious 
freedom  and  the  threefold  struggle  against 
Catholicism,  Nonconformity,  and  rationalism 
will  compel  the  Orthodox  clergy  to  emerge  from 
their  ignorance  and  their  subjection.  The 
priests  will  receive  a  better  education  and 
thereby  acquire  a  moral  authority  which  will 
enable  them  in  turn  to  educate  their  flocks, 
hitherto  so  sadly  neglected.  And,  above  all, 
with  the  progress  of  trade  and  industry  there 
will  arise  a  middle  class,  and  with  the  middle 
class  a  strong  and  independent  opinion,  which 
is  the  prime  condition  of  all  political  liberty. 
But  even  when  these  great  changes  are  accom- 
plished, when  a  ruling  class  and  an  independent 
class  are  constituted,  the  rural  masses  and  their 
leaders,  the  clergy  will  continue  to  respect  the 


36  GREAT  RUSSIA 

established  authorities.  For  generations  to 
come  the  peasantry  and  the  clergy  will  continue 
to  see  in  the  Emperor  and  in  the  Church  their 
spiritual  and  temporal  Providence,  a  patri- 
archal and  beneficent  despotism.  In  one  word, 
Political  Reform  in  Russia  shall  be  conserva- 
tive, or  will  be  a  failure. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  GEOGRAPHICAL  DISTRI- 
BUTION OF  RACES 

WE  have  seen  so  far  that  physical 
geography  and  economic  geography 
are  both  on  the  side  of  tradition 
and  conservatism.  What  can  we  learn  further 
from  the  geographical  distribution  of  races  $ 


We  have  already  emphasized  the  fact  that  for 
ten  centuries  Russia  has  been  a  debatable  land, 
a  terra  nullius,  open  to  all  barbarians  and  to 
all  nomads.  For  ten  centuries  these  barbarian 
hordes  have  swept  like  torrents  over  the  plain. 
But  ever  on  the  fertile  steppe  the  green  grass 
would  grow  again  after  the  horse  of  Attila  had 
passed.  The  forty-eight  races  which  are  scat- 
tered all  over  the  empire  represent  the  alluvial 
strata  of  these  barbaric  invasions.  The  ethno- 
graphical map  of  Russia  tells  us  of  the  migra- 
tions and  revolutions  of  races,   even  as  the 

37 


38  GREAT  RUSSIA 

geological  map  tells  us  the  revolutions  of  the 
crust  of  the  earth.  Tchoudes  and  Tchouvachs, 
Tatars  and  Tcheremissans,  Kalmouks  and 
Khirgiz,  Finns  and  Samoyedes,  Georgians  and 
Lesghians,  Persians  and  Armenians,  Jews  and 
Roumanians,  Germans  and  Swedes,  Poles  and 
Lithuanians,  Great  Russians,  White  Russians, 
Little  Russians — each  unit  of  this  Babel  of  na- 
tions is  a  living  witness  of  a  tragic  past. 

II 

At  first  sight  the  geographical  distribution  of 
races  seems  to  contradict  the  political  lessons 
of  physical  and  economic  geography.  Physical 
and  economic  geography  proclaim  the  unity  of 
the  Russian  Empire  and  the  historical  necessity 
of  a  strong  central  government.  Ethnography, 
on  the  contrary,  seems  to  proclaim  the  infinite 
diversity  of  the  Tsar's  dominions  and  the  ne- 
cessity of  autonomy.  It  seems  as  if  so  many 
heterogeneous  races  could  not  possibly  live  un- 
der one  power  and  one  law. 

But  let  us  observe  that  these  races  are  not 
only  different,  but  irreconcilably  hostile.  And 
the  instinctive  hostilities  of  race  are  compli- 
cated by  differences  of  language,  of  religion, 
and   of   habits.     To   compel    all    those    races 


DISTRIBUTION  OF  RACES        39 

whom  the  vicissitudes  of  history  have  thrown 
together  on  the  same  territory  to  live  in  peace, 
we  again  must  have  an  energetic,  military,  cen- 
tralized government,  which  shall  play  the  part 
of  umpire  and  peacemaker,  and  which  may  re- 
frain and  repress  spontaneous  anarchy  and  civil 
war  which  are  always  ready  to  burst  out.  To 
all  these  people  the  Russian  Empire  has  brought 
the  same  supreme  benefit  as  the  Roman  Em- 
pire :  Pax  Romana,  the  Peace  of  the  Tsar. 

Ill 

Therein  precisely  consists  the  civilizing  part 
which  Russia  has  played  for  centuries.  Recent 
events,  the  anti-Semitic  pogroms,  the  massacres 
of  Jitomir  and  Odessa,  the  Beiliss  trial,  so  far 
from  contradicting  this  truth,  only  confirm  it. 
As  soon  as,  in  consequence  of  the  external  dis- 
asters and  the  internal  agitations,  the  Russian 
Government  began  to  lose  its  authority,  to- 
gether with  its  prestige,  as  soon  as  it  had  to  re- 
call its  regiments  and  to  send  them  to  the  Far 
East,  at  once  the  destructive  forces  reigned  su- 
preme, and  religious  passions,  racial  hatreds, 
got  free  play.  The  Baltic  peasants  murdered 
the  German  barons,  the  Poles  murdered  the 
Russian  officials,   the   Russian  peasants  mur- 


40  GREAT  RUSSIA 

dered  the  Jews,  the  Tatar  insurrectionists,  as  I 
saw  myself  in  Tiflis,  murdered  the  Armenians. 
I  know  full  well  that  these  massacres  have 
been  attributed  to  the  Government  itself, 
which  wanted  to  create  a  diversion,  carrying 
out  the  old  device:  Divide  ut  zmperes.  The 
massacres  have  been  imputed  to  agents  of  the 
secret  police,  to  the  famous  "black  gang"  or 
"tchornia  sotnia."  But  I  must  frankly  confess 
that  I  would  rather  believe  in  the  most  absurd 
legends  of  the  Middle  Ages,  in  the  ritual 
murders,  in  the  crimes  of  witches,  than  believe 
in  the  monstrous  folly  of  a  Government  which 
would  have  organized  those  very  riots  and 
disorders  which  it  was  its  vital  interest  to 
suppress.  No  doubt  subordinate  agents  may 
have  taken  advantage  of  the  prevailing  anarchy 
to  achieve  their  wicked  ends;  but  they  only 
obeyed  their  own  evil  instincts,  not  any  order 
of  the  Government.  How  could  the  Govern- 
ment have  organized  massacres,  when  it  had 
practically  ceased  to  exist"?  And  let  it  not  be 
said  that  such  a  design  would  be  worthy  of  a 
"diabolical"  Russian  Government!  For  such 
a  policy  would  not  even  deserve  to  be  called 
"diabolical,"  it  would  be  simply  idiotic  and 
imbecile,  because  any  disorder  would  ultimately 


DISTRIBUTION  OF  RACES        41 

turn  against  the  Government  itself.  And  not 
even  the  Evil  One  has  ever  been  accused  of 
stupidity. 

IV 

No,  in  truth,  the  explanation  is  less  monstrous. 
The  lamentable  recent  events  are  simply  the 
outbreak  of  what  Taine  has  called  "spon- 
taneous anarchy,"  or  the  spontaneous  genera- 
tion of  anarchy.  It  is  the  primitive  instinct  of 
race  antagonism,  fostered  by  pestilential  Ger- 
man theories,  the  barbarous  passions  of  the 
mob,  which,  hitherto  dormant  and  latent, 
hitherto  repressed  by  the  iron  hand  of  Govern- 
ment, suddenly  burst  out  and  swept  every- 
thing before  them  as  soon  as  that  obstacle 
disappeared.  If  autocracy  or  a  strong  military 
power  did  not  exist  in  Russia  the  massacres  of 
Jitomir  and  of  Odessa  would  alone  suffice  to 
demonstrate  the  necessity  of  its  existence  in  the 
interests  of  humanity  and  civilization. 

And  thus  we  again  have  to  revert  to  the 
same  political  conclusion:  the  ethnography  of 
Russia  teaches  us  exactly  the  same  lessons  as 
physical  and  economic  geography — the  vital 
necessity  of  a  strong  government.  /It  shows 
the  danger,  not  to  say  the  impossibility,  of  the 


42  GREAT  RUSSIA 

principal  article  of  the  revolutionary  pro- 
gramme— an  absolute  parliamentary  regime  on 
the  most  approved  British  pattern.  The  rem- 
edy might  be  worse  than  the  disease;  it  most 
probably  would  kill  the  patient.  A  central- 
ized Parliament  in  which  twenty  nationalities 
would  be  represented  by  twenty  irreconcilable 
parties  would  deliver  Russia  to  legal  anarchy. 
And  legalized  anarchy  has  ever  been  the  very 
worst  of  all  forms  of  government. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  GEOGRAPHICAL  ORIENTA- 
TION OF  RUSSIAN  FOREIGN 
POLITICS 


IF  there  is  one  eternal  and  universal  instinct 
in  human  nature,  it  is  the  irresistible 
impulse  which  attracts  the  inhabitants 
of  northern  countries  to  the  sunny  climes  of  the 
South  and  the  East.  It  is  the  heliotropic  in- 
stinct which  directs  the  flower  towards  heat  and 
light.  It  is  the  instinct  to  which  Goethe  has 
given  immortal  expression  in  the  "Song  of 
Mignon."  It  is  the  instinct  which  for  ages  has 
transformed  Italy,  the  land  of  beauty,  into  a 
land  of  servitude.  It  is  the  instinct  which  has 
directed  the  colonial  expansion  of  Great  Britain, 
and  which  in  our  own  day  has  been  drawing 
Germany  to  the  East. 

II 

With  no  other  nation  has  this  "Drang  nach 
Siiden"  and  this  "Drang  nach  Osten"  been  so 
natural   and  so  intense  as  with  the  Russian 

43 


44  GREAT  RUSSIA 

people.  For  no  other  nation  has  been  so  dis- 
inherited by  Nature,  no  nation  has  been  so  en- 
tirely bereft  of  heat  and  light.  In  the  empire 
of  the  Tsar  there  are  only  two  regions  which 
are  not  subjected  to  the  dominion  of  winter, 
the  Crimea  and  Transcaucasia.  Hence  the 
value  and  prestige  which  for  every  Muscovite 
attach  to  those  "Diamonds  of  the  Crown." 
Hence  the  great  part  which  these  southern 
provinces  have  played  in  the  Russian  poets  and 
novelists,  in  Pushkin's  "Caucasian  Prisoner,"  in 
Lermontov's  "A  Hero  of  our  Time,"  *  in  Tol- 
stoy's "Cossacks."  The  Crimea  and  Transcau- 
casia are  to  a  Russian  what  Switzerland  and 
the  Riviera,  what  Italy  and  Greece,  are  to  an 
Englishman  or  a  Teuton. 

Geography  itself  therefore  seems  to  be  in 
Russia  the  accomplice  of  that  "Drang  nach  Os- 
ten"  and  that  "Drang  nach  Siiden"  in  which 
we  in  the  West  have  only  seen  a  spirit  of  aggres- 
sion. It  is  a  most  significant  and  far-reaching 
fact  that  the  three  great  rivers  of  Russia,  the 
Dnieper,  the  Don,  and  the  Volga,  all  flow  east- 
wards and  southwards.  As  these  three  rivers 
are  the  vital  arteries  of  Russia,  as  they  are  the 

*  This  has  just  been  added  to  Alfred  A.  Knopf's  series  of 
translations  from  the  Russian. 


RUSSIAN  FOREIGN  POLITICS     45 

three  great  routes  of  migration  and  invasion, 
the  three  highways  of  commerce,  as  they  have 
determined  the  direction  of  the  whole  history 
of  the  Russian  people — we  may  say  that  Rus- 
sia, in  "orientating"  her  foreign  policy  south- 
wards and  eastwards,  has  not  only  obeyed  an 
instinct  common  to  all  that  lives  and  breathes, 
but  has  merely  followed  the  trend  of  her  enor- 
mous rivers,  carrying  slowly  but  surely  the  des- 
tinies of  those  Northern  Barbarians  towards  the 
Sunny  South. 

Ill  ^ 

But  in  addition  to  the  helio tropic  instinct  char- 
acteristic of  all  Northern  peoples,  in  addi- 
tion to  the  "oriental"  trend  of  the  great  rivers, 
there  is  still  another  potent  impulse  which  has 
given  its  direction  to  Russian  history,  and  which 
an  Englishman  ought  to  be  the  last  to  ignore, 
and  that  is  the  desire  to  possess  a  free  outlet  to 
the  sea — the  sea  which,  so  far  from  separating 
nations,  binds  them  together,  the  sea  which  will 
bring  Russia  nearer  to  the  cradle  of  religion 
and  civilization,  which  will  transform  the  ag- 
ricultural Russia  into  a  commercial  and  indus- 
trial Russia,  which  will  bring  trade  and  wealth, 
freedom  and  power. 


46  GREAT  RUSSIA 

Remember  the  famous  page  where  the  Greek 
historian  describes  the  solemn  and  blessed  mo- 
ment when,  after  long  months  of  expectation 
and  suffering,  the  Ten  Thousand  Companions 
of  Xenophon  finally  perceived  the  sea,  the 
supreme  object  of  their  desires.  6dXaaaa\ 
Thalassa!  the  cry  which  two  thousand  years  ago 
burst  from  the  breast  of  the  Greeks,  has  also 
been  the  sacred  cry  of  the  Russians!  Tha- 
lassa! This  cry  sums  up  their  whole  history. 
For  Russian  history  in  modern  times  is  noth- 
ing but  an  endless  "Expedition  of  the  Ten 
Thousand,"  a  long  effort  to  reach  the  "open 
Sea."  Thalassa!  expresses  both  the  past  and 
the  future  of  the  people;  all  the  realities  which 
they  covet  and  all  the  ideal  things  which  they 
dream  of. 

IV 

For  the  aspirations  of  religion  combine  to 
strengthen  and  to  sanctify  the  blind  desires  of 
political  instinct;  for  the  "Drang  nach  Os- 
ten"  will  not  only  bring  material  wealth,  the 
contact  with  civilization;  it  also  means  the  re- 
alization of  the  religious  destiny  of  Russia. 
The  protectorate  over  Turkey  and  Asia  Minor 


RUSSIAN  FOREIGN  POLITICS     47 

will  be  the  enfranchisement  of  the  Slav  nations 
of  the  Balkans,  of  the  Orthodox  brethren 
weighed  down  by  the  cruel  yoke  of  the  Turk, 
and  it  will  involve  the  protectorate  over  Byzan- 
tium and  Jerusalem,  the  two  holy  cities  of  the 
"Pravoslavs." 

The  Oriental  and  Asiatic  policy  of  Russia  is, 
therefore,  not  a  policy  of  adventure  and  con- 
quests. It  is  a  natural  and  national  policy. 
From  the  Russian  point  of  view  it  is  a  perfectly 
legitimate  and  indeed  a  necessary  one.  The 
will  of  Peter  the  Great,  whether  it  be  authentic 
or  not,  corresponds  to  a  political  reality;  it  is 
the  sacred  inheritance  and  the  historic  mission 
which  Russians  for  the  last  three  centuries 
have  transmitted  from  generation  to  genera- 
tion. The  struggle  for  the  possession  of  Con- 
stantinople, "Tsargrad,"  both  the  capital  of  the 
Cross  and  of  the  Crescent,  is  the  only  one  which 
has  always  rallied  all  the  subjects  of  the  Tsar, 
all  political  opinions,  and  all  political  aspira- 
tions. The  conservatives,  the  Church,  and  the 
peasantry  desire  this  policy  because  it  must  en- 
sure the  triumph  of  Orthodoxy.  Liberals  and 
"Occidentals"  and  intellectuals  desire  it  because 
it  will  compel  Russia  to  emerge  from  her  isola- 


48  GREAT  RUSSIA 

tion,  and  must  bring  her  nearer  to  the  centres 
of  civilization.  Realists  and  Jingoists  desire 
it  because  it  must  bring  with  it  wealth  and  em- 


pire! 


All  these  desires  and  all  these  dreams  suf- 
fered a  terrible  check  ten  years  ago  through  the 
disasters  in  the  Far  East.  Therein  mainly  re- 
sides the  pathetic  interest  of  the  Russo-Japa- 
nese War.  Therein  also  lies  largely  the  ex- 
planation of  the  internal  convulsions  which 
followed.  For  generations  Russia  had  been 
advancing  slowly  but  surely  towards  the  ulti- 
mate goal  of  what  she  considers  her  "historic 
mission."  Like  a  weary  traveller,  exhausted 
by  a  long  march,  and  who,  arriving  near  the 
end,  wanting  to  make  one  supreme  effort  to  has- 
ten on  the  desirable  consummation — falls  down 
prostrate,  in  view  of  the  promised  land — even 
so  the  Russians,  on  the  eve  of  achieving  their 
dreams,  after  patiently  waiting  for  centuries, 
were  suddenly  seized  with  a  feverish  impatience 
and  tried  to  precipitate  events.  They  failed, 
and  they  paid  for  their  impatience  with  the  tem- 
porary ruin  of  their  hopes,  with  unheard-of  dis- 
asters and  with  a  tragic  revolution. 


PART  II 
What  the  World  Owes  to  Russia 


CHAPTER  VI 

RUSSIAN  VERSUS  GERMAN 
CULTURE 

I.  The  Fallacy  of  the  Russian  Peril 

WHEN  we  assert  that  in  this  war  of 
the  nations  the  Allies  stand  as  the 
champions  of  Democracy  and  Lib- 
erty and  Civilization  versus  Militarism,  Des- 
potism and  Reaction,  we  are  almost  invariably 
met  with  the  ironical  question:  "What  about 
Russia?"  And  when  we  assert  that  it  is  Prus- 
sia which  is  primarily  and  solely  responsible  for 
the  appalling  tragedy,  the  pro-German  cham- 
pions invariably  retort  with  the  counter-propo- 
sition that  Germany  is  only  waging  a  defensive 
war,  that  she  is  protecting  herself,  that  she  is 
protecting  Europe  against  the  "Slav  peril," 
against  "Russian  barbarism,"  against  the 
"Asiatic  hordes,"  against  the  persecutors  of  the 
Jews,  against  a  greedy  and  reactionary  Govern- 
ment. 

I  have  had  to  face  this  commonplace  of  the 
Russian  peril  in  almost  every  meeting  which  I 
have  recently  addressed  in  the  United  States 

Si 


52  GREAT  RUSSIA 

on  behalf  of  the  cause  of  the  Allies.  The 
"Russian  Peril"  was  the  great  argument  ad- 
duced by  my  pro-German  opponents.  But  not 
only  does  the  prejudice  do  considerable  harm 
in  the  United  States,  it  still  wields  considerable 
influence  in  England.  Times  have  no  doubt 
changed  since  the  "Russian  Peril"  was  de- 
nounced in  this  country  and  since  the  capture 
of  Merv  produced  a  frantic  attack  of  "Mervous- 
ness."  But  the  old  "Mervousness"  still  seems 
to  possess  the  faithful  Radical  guard  and  the 
old-fashioned  commonplaces  continue  to  be 
voiced  even  by  such  "advanced"  people  as  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw,  who  does  not  generally  deal  in 
commonplaces.  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  in  his 
"Common  Sense  About  the  War,"  where  so 
much  common  sense  is  mixed  up  with  so  much 
nonsense,  seems  to  have  written  on  the  assump- 
tion that  genius  and  wit  can  take  the  place  of  a 
knowledge  of  the  elementary  facts  of  Russian 
history  of  which  he  is  unfortunately  totally  de- 
void. 

II.  A  Conspiracy  of  Slander  Against 
Russia 

There  never  was  a  race  more  continuously  and 
more  systematically  maligned  than  the  Slav 


RUSSIAN  v.  GERMAN  CULTURE     53 

race.  Truly,  it  is  significant  that  the  word 
"Slav,"  which  in  the  native  speech  means 
"glorious  and  illustrious,"  has  become  synon- 
ymous with  "Slave."  It  is  a  tragic  paradox 
that  the  very  people  who  have  been  the  one 
bulwark  against  Asiatic  hordes  and  a  protection 
against  the  Tartar  invasion  should  still  be  de- 
nounced as  a  people  of  Asiatics  and  Tartars, 
/it  is  a  paradox  that  we  should  revile  as  bar- 
barians the  very  nation  whose  sublime  mission 
in  history  has  been  to  win  over  the  barbarians 
of  Asia  to  Christianity  and  to  European  civili- 
zation. 

III.  Why  the  Russian  People  Are 
Misrepresented 

The  plain  truth  is  that  for  practical  purposes 
Russia  still  remains  a  "terra  incognita!''  to  the 
vast  majority  of  Britishers  and  Americans. 
Even  to-day  there  are  probably  not  half  a  dozen 
writers  of  standing  who  have  a  first-hand  knowl- 
edge of  that  great  nation,  with  her  population 
of  175,000,000.  And  the  reasons  for  that 
ignorance  are  not  far  to  seek.  There  are  first 
the  difficulties  of  the  language.  The  Russian 
language  is  very  beautiful,  but  it  is  also  very 
difficult.     It  seems   to  be   almost  inaccessible 


54  GREAT  RUSSIA 

to  a  people  who  in  the  past  have  been  so  refrac- 
tory to  the  study  of  foreign  languages  as  the 
British  people.  There  are,  further,  the  diffi- 
culties of  distance  and  size.  Russia  is  not  a 
country  which  can  easily  be  overrun  by  hur- 
ried holiday  trippers.  Even  as  you  cannot 
learn  the  Russian  language  in  two  months,  so 
you  cannot  "do"  the  Russian  Empire  in  two 
weeks. 

In  the  presence  of  those  formidable  obstacles, 
it  is  scarcely  to  be  wondered  at  that  the  field  of 
Russian  controversy  should  have  been  left  free 
to  the  enemies  of  Russia.  And,  unfortunately, 
Russia  has  many  irreconcilable  enemies.  There 
are  the  Russian  Nihilists  and  Revolutionists 
who  have  legitimate  grievances  against  an  auto- 
cratic Government,  and  who  for  generations 
have  made  London  a  hot-bed  of  political  plots. 
There  are  the  Polish  refugees  who  for  a  hun- 
dred years  have  pleaded  the  cause  of  Polish 
freedom  in  every  capital  of  Europe.  And, 
above  all,  there  are  the  Russian  Jews  who  in 
every  country  have  constituted  themselves  the 
passionate  apostles  of  an  anti-Russian  propa- 
ganda. 

The  Jewish  problem  is  a  difficult  problem  in 


RUSSIAN  v.  GERMAN  CULTURE  55 
every  country.  It  is  becoming  a  difficult  prob- 
lem even  in  the  United  States.  But  it  is  es- 
pecially acute  in  Russia.  Russia  has  a  larger 
Jewish  population  than  all  the  other  countries 
of  the  world  together.  Russian  Poland  alone 
has  a  Jewish  population  of  five  millions.  Nor 
has  she  ever  been  able  to  assimilate  or  to  con- 
ciliate her  Jewish  population.  As  Mr.  Stephen 
Graham  points  out  in  his  recent  book,  "Russia 
and  the  World,"  there  has  been  in  the  past 
an  irreconcilable  conflict  between  the  Russian 
and  Jewish  racial  elements.  At  various  times 
Russia  has  made  desperate  efforts  to  reject 
the  alien  element  from  her  body  politic.  The 
deliberate  and  often  cruel  and  always  fu- 
tile policy  of  the  Government  towards  the  He- 
brew race,  and  the  instinctive  hatred  of  the 
people,  have  frequently  resulted  in  pogroms  and 
in  organized  massacres.  And  the  victims  of 
Russian  persecution  have  naturally  avenged 
themselves  by  maligning  their  oppressors. 
Surely  no  member  of  the  Hebrew  race  can  be 
blamed  if  he  is  not  enamoured  of  the  Russian 
Government. 

All  these  hostile  elements:  Revolutionists, 
Polish  refugees,  and  Polish-Russian  Jews  have 


56  GREAT  RUSSIA 

conducted  and  are  still  conducting  in  Great 
Britain  a  systematic  campaign  of  calumny  such 
as  the  Irish  irreconcilables  have  conducted,  and 
are  still  conducting,  in  America,  against  Great 
Britain. 

IV.  Geographical  Surroundings  in  Russia 

If  we  wish  to  be  just  to  the  Russian  Govern- 
ment and  to  the  Russian  people  the  first  condi- 
tion is  that  we  should  try  to  discriminate  be- 
tween what  is  owing  to  the  fatality  of  Nature 
and  what  is  owing  to  the  intervention  of  Man. 
No  one  will  ever  understand  Russia's  political 
history  who  does  not  constantly  keep  in  mind 
the  close  interdependence  which  exists  in  Rus- 
sia between  physics  and  politics,  between  the 
economic  and  the  moral  factors.  This  truth 
is  so  essential  that  I  may  be  permitted  to  em- 
phasize a  paragraph  in  a  previous  chapter  be- 
cause that  paragraph  gives  the  key  to  the  Rus- 
sian problem. 

"In  no  other  country  have  geographical  con- 
ditions left  a  more  indelible  imprint.  Nowhere 
else  have  men  felt  more  deeply  the  all-pervad- 
ing influence  of  physical  surroundings,  of  cli- 
mate and  of  race.     There  are  some  countries, 


RUSSIAN  v.  GERMAN  CULTURE    57 

like  England,  where  man  has  conquered  Na- 
ture, where  Nature  has  become  the  benevolent 
and  ministering  servant  of  man.  There  are 
other  countries,  like  Russia,  where  it  is  Nature 
that  always  threatens  to  enslave  man.  In  few 
other  countries  have  men  been  compelled  to 
submit  to  that  physical  despotism  with  a  more 
passive  resignation,  the  resignation  of  a  Tolstoi, 
which  is  so  representative  of  the  race.  And  in 
no  other  country  has  Nature  given  more  cruelly 
and  more  emphatically  the  lie  to  the  noble 
dreams  of  idealists.  Idealists  may  dream  their 
dreams,  proclaim  their  systems,  and  claim  their 
reforms.  But  the  great  natural,  economic,  cli- 
matic forces  in  Russia  continue  to  follow  their 
immovable  course,  heedless  of  systems  and  re- 
forms. The  political  destiny  of  Russia  seems 
to  have  been  written  not  in  the  book  of  philos- 
ophy, but  in  the  stern  and  sibylline  book  of 
Nature ;  it  has  followed  the  bend  of  rivers  and 
the  curves  of  isothermic  lines;  and  one  guesses 
its  mystery,  and  one  catches  its  meaning  more 
surely  and  more  easily  by  listening  to  the  mur- 
mur of  forests  and  steppes  than  by  listening  to 
the  most  plausible  theories  of  revolutionists." 


58  GREAT  RUSSIA 

V.  The  Essential  and  the  Accidental 
in  Russian  History 

And  the  second  condition  which  any  fair  and 
judicious  student  of  Russian  history  will  have 
to  take  into  account  is  a  judicious  discrimina- 
tion between  what  is  essential  and  what  is 
merely  accidental.  The  insensate  murder  of 
Alexander  II,  the  emancipator  of  40,000,000 
serfs,  the  liberator  of  Bulgaria  and  Serbia,  a 
crime  which  took  place  on  the  very  eve  of  the 
proclamation  of  a  new  Russian  Constitution, 
and  which  deflected  the  whole  course  of  con- 
temporary Russian  history,  was  an  accident  and 
a  catastrophe.  On  the  contrary,  the  near  East- 
ern and  Far  Eastern  policy  of  Russia  has  been 
throughout  the  ages  one  of  the  dominating 
forces  of  Russian  history.  To  the  philosophi- 
cal historian  it  is  the  general  law,  it  is  the  nor- 
mal development,  it  is  the  dominating  forces 
and  not  the  accidents  and  catastrophies  which 
matter.  It  is  the  traditional  policy,  it  is  the 
popular  aspirations  and  ideals  which  alone  pro- 
vide a  firm  and  safe  foundation  for  historical 
judgment. 

Unfortunately  it  is  the  sensational  accidents 
and  not  the  unsensational  developments  of  Rus- 


RUSSIAN  v.  GERMAN  CULTURE     59 

sian  history  which  have  arrested  the  attention 
of  historians  and  publicists.  Popular  Russian 
history  continues  to  be  written,  as  if  Nihilism 
and  regicide,  as  if  persecutions  and  pogroms 
were  the  one  normal  and  characteristic  develop- 
ment of  the  Russian  people.  We  are  told  lit- 
tle of  the  nobler  traditions  of  the  Government, 
of  the  deeper  instincts  of  the  people.  We  are 
told  little  of  all  that  Russia  has  done  for  Chris- 
tian civilization,  through  her  victory  over  the 
Tartars,  for  European  political  freedom, 
through  her  victory  over  Napoleon,  for  the 
emancipation  of  small  nationalities  through  her 
victories  over  the  Turks.  It  is  just  as  if  Great 
Britain  were  to  be  judged  solely  by  her  pitiful 
failure  in  Ireland,  or  as  if  the  evictions  of  small 
crofters  in  the  Highlands  were  described  as  the 
characteristic  event  of  Scottish  history. 

VI.  Necessity  of  Distinguishing  Between 
the  Government  and  the  People 

We  have  already  cautioned  the  student  of 
Russian  history  against  the  axiom  that  every 
nation  has  the  Government  it  deserves,  and  de- 
serves the  Government  it  has.  That  axiom 
is  only  true,  and  even  then  only  partially 
true,  when  the  people,  as  is  the  case  in  Prus- 


60  GREAT  RUSSIA 

sia,  have  no  profound  sense  of  political  liberty 
and  of  personal  dignity,  where  they  abjectly 
and  willingly  submit  to  that  Government.  It 
is  only  true  where  the  subjects  accept  the  full 
responsibility  for  the  policy  of  their  rulers, 
where  they  glorify,  as  the  Prussians  do  glorify, 
every  evil  deed  of  the  civil  and  military  author- 
ities. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  may  happen  that  the 
people  are  much  better  than  their  Government, 
when  it  would  be  odiously  unfair  to  hold  them 
responsible  for  its  excesses  and  abuses,  where 
both  Government  and  people  are  the  victims  of 
circumstances  and  accident,  where  the  nation 
have  made  heroic  efforts  to  reform  their  abuses. 

And  every  student  of  Russian  history  knows 
that  the  Russian  people  are  infinitely  better 
than  their  bureaucracy,  and  that  the  bureau- 
cracy is  not  representative  of  the  people,  who 
in  cases  innumerable  have  fought  the  battles  of 
civic  liberty.  Russian  history  is  an  inspiring 
history,  where  even  the  ignorant  moujik,  where 
even  feeble  women  have  laid  down  their  lives  in 
defence  of  popular  rights  and  human  freedom. 


CHAPTER  VII 

RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  DEMOC- 
RACY AND  LIBERTY 


IF  there  is  any  truth  in  the  Darwinian  doc- 
trine of  "the  survival  of  the  fittest,"  the 
Russian  people  must  be  one  of  the  strong 
nations  of  the  earth.  From  early  history  they 
have  been  schooled  in  the  stern  discipline  of 
privation  and  suffering.  For  centuries  they 
have  borne  the  brunt  of  the  Tartar  invasion. 
Their  physical  power  of  resistance  and  their 
moral  fibre  have  been  tested  periodically  by 
plague  and  famine,  by  war  and  political  per- 
secution. They  have  at  all  times  been  tested 
by  poverty  and  by  the  severity  of  a  relentless 
climate.  In  the  process  the  weak  have  been 
eliminated  and  the  strong  have  become  stronger. 
The  result  has  been  a  sturdy,  hardened  people, 
with  a  magnificent  physique  and  of  extraor- 
dinary vitality.     The  final  outcome  has  been 

one  of  the  creative  civilizations  of  the  world, 

61 


62  GREAT  RUSSIA 

equally  original  in  religion  and  politics,  in  art 
and  literature,  a  civilization  which  is  rapidly  as- 
similating all  the  best  elements  of  Western  cul- 
ture. 

II.  Russia  Stands  for  Essential 
Christianity 

Superficial  publicists  have  identified  Russia 
with  Nihilism,  and  especially  with  that  Nihil- 
ist type  impersonated  in  the  character  of  the 
Atheist  Revolutionist  Bazarov  in  Turgenev's 
"Fathers  and  Sons."  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
Revolutionary  Atheism  is  an  entirely  German 
importation.  In  no  other  country  has  the 
Christian  religion  struck  deeper  root  than  in 
Russia.  The  typical  Russian  believes  not  in 
the  gospel  according  to  St.  Marx,  but  in  the 
gospel  according  to  St.  Mark.  Orthodoxy,  the 
pravos  slavie  of  the  Slavophiles,  has  been  one 
of  the  three  factors  of  Russian  nationality. 
As  the  Prussians  are  certainly  to-day  the  least 
religious  people  in  Europe,  the  Russians  are 
probably  the  most  religious.  As  I  pointed  out 
in  a  previous  chapter,  in  the  Russian  language 
the  same  word  Krestianine  means  both  "peas- 
ant" and  "Christian."  Even  unsympathetic 
observers  like  Mr.  Wells  have  been  profoundly 


RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  LIBERTY     63 

impressed  by  the  childlike  and  simple  faith 
of  the  people.  Cynics  have  railed  at  the  su- 
perstition of  the  ignorant  moujik,  as  if  Chris- 
tianity were  a  monopoly  of  the  wealthy,  the 
educated,  and  the  learned.  The  truth  is,  that 
the  religion  of  the  moujik  is  the  nearest  ap- 
proach to  primitive  Christianity  and  to  the 
faith  of  the  Golden  Age  of  St.  Francis  of  Assisi 
and  St.  Thomas  Aquinas.  To  visit  the  Cata- 
combs of  Kiev  or  the  Troitsa  Lavra  on  a  holi- 
day, to  accompany  the  Russian  pilgrims  to 
Jerusalem,  is  to  travel  back  to  the  Middle 
Ages.  The  Russian  Church  may  have  badly 
suffered  from  the  confusion  of  spiritual  and 
temporal  power  introduced  by  Peter  the  Great. 
Formalism  and  ritualism  may  play  an  exces- 
sive part  in  the  economy  of  religion,  but  the 
spirit  is  everywhere  alive,  and  the  ideals  of 
Christianity  continue  to  inspire  the  individual 
lives  of  the  people.  Nowhere  is  the  "Niet- 
schean"  spirit  so  little  prevalent.  Nowhere  is 
the  Christian  temper  of  meekness  and  humility, 
of  charity  and  brotherhood,  of  self-surrender 
and  self-sacrifice  so  common  as  in  Russia. 

And  the  Christian  spirit  is  a  no  less  potent 
force  in  the  public  life  of  the  nation.  As  I 
have  amply  proved  in  a  subsequent  chapter 


64  GREAT  RUSSIA 

dealing  with  the  revolutionary  crisis  of  1905, 
it  was  an  unpardonable  blunder  of  the  so-called 
"Intelligensia"  of  the  doctrinaire  revolutionists 
of  1905  to  ignore  the  spiritual  force  of  the 
Church.  When  drastic  religious  reforms  were 
originally  proposed  by  the  clerical  members  of 
the  Church  in  the  first  Duma,  their  demands 
were  contemptuously  dismissed  by  a  superior 
"Intelligensia."  Those  doctrinaires  ignored  the 
vital  fact  that  no  Revolution  has  ever  been 
successful  unless  it  assumed  a  religious  form, 
and  that  this  truth  applies  to  Russia  even 
more  completely  than  to  England  or  America 
or  France.  In  1905  the  Press  of  the  world 
unanimously  predicted  the  downfall  of  the 
Monarchy  and  the  triumph  of  the  Revolution- 
ists. I  confidently  predicted  that  nothing 
would  happen.  And  nothing  did  happen. 
The  political  leaders,  disciples  of  the  super- 
thinkers  Marx,  and  Haeckel  and  Nietzsche, 
leaders  whose  revolutionary  theories  had  been 
almost  entirely  "made  in  Germany" — that  is 
to  say,  in  the  very  country  which  never  had 
the  courage  to  carry  through  a  successful  revo- 
lution— were  neither  understood  nor  followed 
by  the  people.  The  only  leader  who  in  that 
eventful  year  had  a  powerful  following  pre- 


RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  LIBERTY     65 

cisely  happened  to  be  a  priest.  If  Father  Ga- 
pon  had  been  an  honest  man  and  an  enthusiast, 
he  would  have  succeeded  where  all  the  orators 
of  the  "Intelligensia"  ignominiously  failed. 

III.  Russia  Stands  for  Democracy 

The  spirit  of  equality  and  brotherhood  is  uni- 
versally prevalent  in  Russia,  and  I  need  hardly 
add  that  that  spirit  is  the  spiritual  foundation 
of  all  democratic  government.  Strange  as  it 
may  sound  to  the  English  theorist,  Russia 
stands  for  democracy.  To  outward  appear- 
ance the  Russian  Government  is  an  autocracy, 
but  that  autocracy  is  of  an  essentially  demo- 
cratic nature.  The  Russian  Empire  is  a  huge 
peasant  commonwealth,  a  federation  of  forty 
thousand  democratic  republics,  thousands  of 
which  have  retained  the  socialist  and  collectiv- 
ist  organization  of  the  "Mir"  or  village  com- 
munity. 

For  the  Russian  is  not  like  the  Scot  or  the 
American  a  born  individualist,  rather  is  he  a 
born  Socialist.  Now,  individualism  generally 
creates  for  itself  an  aristocratic  or  bourgeois  or 
middle  class  form  of  society.  The  Socialist 
spirit  finds  its  most  fitting  expression  in  democ- 
racy. 


66  GREAT  RUSSIA 

There  is  in  Russia  no  caste  or  class,  there  is 
no  pride  of  birth.  The  mercantile  and  indus- 
trial class  is  only  just  emerging,  and  its  place 
is  largely  taken  by  Jews  and  foreigners.  From 
85  to  90  per  cent,  of  the  people  remain  peas- 
ants. There  is  no  organized  nobility,  and 
whatever  nobility  exists  possesses  no  such  feu- 
dal basis  as  in  Prussia  and  even  as  in  England. 
There  is  no  right  of  entail ;  there  are  no  privi- 
leges of  the  elder  son.  Every  child,  son  or 
daughter,  inherits  an  equal  share  of  the  parental 
property,  and  inherits  the  rank  and  title  of  the 
family.  We  often  hear  members  of  the  Russian 
nobility  described  in  the  British  Press  as  Prince 
Troubetzkoy  or  Prince  Galitzine.  The  fact  is, 
that  there  are  hundreds  of  Princes  Troubetzkoi 
and  Princes  Galitzine,  and  the  title  of  prince 
carries  with  it  neither  wealth  nor  political  dis- 
tinction. A  man's  position  in  the  State  is  en- 
tirely determined  by  the  "Tchin" — i.e.  by  the 
rank  he  has  attained  in  the  civil  and  military 
service. 

It  is  interesting  to  note  that  at  the  other  ex- 
tremity of  Europe  the  same  democratic  feature 
should  be  the  outstanding  characteristic  of  two 
other  Slav  and  Greek  orthodox  commonwealths 
— the    Serbians    and    the    Bulgarians.     Both 


RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  LIBERTY     67 

countries  are  like  Russia  peasant  communities. 
The  Serbian  statistics  of  the  division  of  land, 
with  its  total  absence  of  large  estates,  are 
a  revelation  of  the  social  and  economic  con- 
ditions of  gallant  little  Serbia.  Such  statistics 
are,  perhaps,  unparalleled  in  European  history. 
They  show  to  what  extent  the  old  aristocracy 
has  been  stamped  out,  and  how  completely 
Serbia,  like  Bulgaria  and  Russia,  is  a  country 
of  small  landholders,  and  in  the  strictest  sense 
of  the  word,  a  peasant  democracy. 


• 


IV.  Russia  Stands  for  Freedom 

Russia  stands  for  freedom,  for  the  untram- 
melled freedom  of  the  nomad  roaming  over  the 
steppe.  The  Russians  carry  freedom  to  the 
verge  of  anarchy.  It  is  not  a  mere  accident 
that  the  three  most  consistent  theorists  of  an- 
archism, Bakounine,  Kropotkin  and  Tolstoy, 
are  typical  Russians.  All  through  the  Middle 
Ages  a  considerable  part  of  civilized  Russia 
was  inhabited  by  free  tillers  of  the  soil.  She 
glorified  the  free  republics  of  Novgorod, 
Pskov,  and  Viatka.  As  was  pointed  out  in 
Chapter  II,  it  was  only  the  necessity  of  national 
defence  and  the  incessent  incursions  of  Tartars 
in  the  East  and  of  Poles  in  the  West  which 


68  GREAT  RUSSIA 

compelled  the  Russian  people  to  accept  the 
protection  of  a  strong  Government,  and  to 
surrender  their  liberties  to  the  Grand  Dukes 
of  Muscovy.  And  it  was  only  in  the  six- 
teenth century  that  serfdom  was  established, 
namely,  in  the  troubled  times  of  the  Smoutnoe 
Vremia  of  Boris  Godounov.  It  is  strange  that 
serfdom  should  have  been  established  in  Rus- 
sia at  the  very  moment  when  everywhere  else 
in  Europe  it  was  being  abolished.  But  it  is 
stranger  still  that  the  Russian  peasants  should 
have  been  free  at  the  time  when  everywhere 
else  in  Europe  peasants  still  were  slaves.  In 
the  words  of  a  famous  French  writer :  "C'est  la 
liberte  qui  est  ancienne  en  Russie  et  non  le  des- 
potisme." 

Freedom  with  the  Russians  is  an  elemental 
instinct,  a  fanatical  passion,  the  passion  which 
creates  martyrs,  which  sends  its  votaries  to  Si- 
beria and  to  the  scaffold.  Political  freedom 
in  Russia  has  often  been  repressed,  it  has  never 
been  destroyed,  as  it  has  been  destroyed  in  Prus- 
sia. In  Prussia  the  people  have  had  the  bene- 
fit of  universal  education.  They  have  attained 
to  a  high  degree  of  industrial  development. 
The  German  Socialists  are  strongly  organized 
in  a  party,  they  command  many  millions  of 


RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  LIBERTY     69 

votes.  Yet  they  have  never  had  the  courage 
of  asserting  their  rights.  They  have  been  ready 
to  hold  processions  innumerable.  But  they 
have  always  forgotten  that  political  liberty  is 
not  gained  by  talking,  by  making  demonstra- 
tions. They  have  always  forgotten  that  men 
must  be  prepared  to  make  sacrifices  in  order  to 
conquer  their  freedom. 

The  one  uprising  of  the  Prussian  people  was 
the  abortive  revolutionary  movement  of  1848, 
which  mainly  resulted  in  the  people  offering  the 
Imperial  Crown  of  Germany  to  the  reactionary 
King  of  Prussia. 

Compare  with  the  attitude  of  the  German 
people  to  their  oppressors  the  attitude  of  the 
Russian  people.  It  is  true,  the  vast  majority 
are  poor,  illiterate,  inarticulate  peasants.  They 
have  no  Press  to  voice  their  demands.  They 
are  not  organized  in  a  party.  Yet  again  and 
again  they  have  challenged  reactionary  Gov- 
ernments. We  may  condemn  the  Terrorist 
crimes,  we  may  come  to  the  conclusion  that  they 
were  not  only  political  crimes,  but  tactical  blun- 
ders, but  we  cannot  help  admiring  the  spirit 
which  animated  the  Russian  revolutionists, 
even  when  those  revolutionists  had  their  minds 
poisoned  with  the  dreary  philosophical  material- 


70  GREAT  RUSSIA 

ism  of  Buchner  and  Haeckel,  and  the  economic 
materialism  of  Marx.  Russians,  even  when 
they  are  materialists  in  theory,  remain  incur- 
able idealists  in  practice. 

And  it  is  because  the  Russian  is  animated 
with  that  noble  passion  for  freedom,  it  is  be- 
cause he  is  not  politically  servile  like  the  Prus- 
sian, it  is  because  the  Slav  refuses  to  be  a  slave, 
that  we  may  look  forward  with  every  confi- 
dence to  the  result  of  the  new  Liberal  Constitu- 
tion which  the  Russian  people  conquered  in 
1905.  J  The  Russian  Duma  is  only  a  few  years 
old,  but  representative  institutions  have  already 
struck  deeper  roots  in  Russia  in  five  years  than 
they  have  in  Prussia  in  fifty  years.  And  the 
Russian  people  have  proved  their  capacity  for 
self-government  even  more  conspicuously  in 
their  local  administration,  in  their  Zemstvo 
which,  as  well  as  Zemski  Sobor,  can  be  traced 
back  to  the  remotest  traditions  of  Russian  his- 
tory. The  Zemstvo  is  destined  more  and 
more  to  encroach  on  the  activities  of  the  Cen- 
tral Parliament.  For  decentralization  and 
Home  Rule,  Voluntary  Association  and  Co- 
operation are  the  watchwords  of  all  Russian 
Liberals.  And  it  is  certainly  a  significant  fact 
that  in  a  few  years  twenty  thousand  agricul- 


RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  LIBERTY     71 

tural  co-operative  societies  have  renewed  the 
economic  life  of  the  country. 

V.  Intellectual  Freedom  in  Russia 
and  the  Russian  Censorship 

A  legend  has  grown  up  in  England,  and  still 
largely  obtains,  that  intellectual  freedom  does 
not  exist  in  Russia,  that  every  original  thinker 
has  been  ruthlessly  suppressed.  It  is  true  that 
Russian  literature  has  known  many  dark  days 
of  implacable  reaction  and  has  produced  many 
martyrs.  But  even  in  those  dark  days  a  Gogol 
or  a  Tolstoy  could  not  be  prevented  from  giv- 
ing their  message.  And  the  fact  is,  that  before 
the  revolutionary  movement  of  1905  greater  in- 
tellectual freedom  existed  in  Russia  than  even 
in  Great  Britain,  that  revolutionists  were  al- 
lowed almost  untrammelled  to  carry  on  their 
propaganda  through  the  written  word,  that  the 
Russian  Empire  was  flooded  with  subversive 
and  anarchist  literature,  and  that  a  young 
writer's  best  chance  to  please  a  large  section  of 
the  Russian  public  was  to  be  sufficiently  "ad- 
vanced" and  in  opposition  to  the  Government. 
It  is  also  true  that  even  at  the  present  day  pub- 
licists and  journalists  continue  to  be  subjected 
to  the  censorship.     But  so  are  playwrights  sub- 


72  GREAT  RUSSIA 

jected  to  dramatic  censorship  in  Great  Britain. 
And  British  censorship  is  in  many  cases  more 
severe  than  Russian.  "Monna  Vanna,"  of 
Maeterlinck,  was  widely  circulated  in  Russia. 
It  was  prohibited  in  Great  Britain.  It  is  also 
true  that  any  personal  attack  on  members  of  the 
Government  or  the  bureaucracy  might  lead  to 
unpleasant  encounters  with  the  police,  but  any 
personal  attack  in  Great  Britain  might  lead  to 
even  more  unpleasant  prosecutions  under  the 
libel  law. 

I  hold  no  brief  for  the  Russian  censorship, 
which  is  a  survival  of  a  regime  which  is  rap- 
idly passing  away,  and  which  is  a  disused 
organ  of  a  vanishing  autocracy.  But  the  Rus- 
sian censorship,  even  in  its  palmiest  days,  was 
utterly  futile,  and  for  the  last  generation  it  has 
interfered  with  the  liberty  of  the  Press  just  as 
little  as  French  censorship  interfered  with  the 
freedom  of  French  literature  in  the  days  of 
Voltaire  and  Rousseau,  in  the  days  when 
"Emile"  was  burned  by  the  hangman.  Rus- 
sian censorship  does  not  even  prevent  an  amount 
of  intellectual  licence  which  would  stagger  the 
British  public.  It  is  the  impulsive  and  irre* 
sponsible  violence  of  a  section  of  the  opposition 
Press  which  largely  explains  the  retention  of 


RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  LIBERTY     73 

the  censorship.  The  Russian  extremists  have 
not  yet  learnt  the  lesson  of  British  political  his- 
tory, that  self -government  is  impossible  without 
self-control  and  self-restraint.)  If  the  Russian 
Press  used  but  a  fraction  of  the  self-restraint 
which  in  Britain  is  imposed  either  by  public 
opinion  or  by  the  libel  law,  Russian  censorship 
would  have  long  ceased  to  exist. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

RUSSIA  AS  THE  LIBERATOR  OF 
OPPRESSED  NATIONALITIES 


THE  Russian  people  have  not  only 
wished  freedom  for  themselves.  Long 
before  they  succeeded  in  conquering  a 
measure  of  political  liberty  for  themselves, 
they  had  conquered  it  for  their  brethren  in  the 
Balkan  States.  Whereas  Austria  has  always 
stood  for  the  oppression  and  suppression  of 
small  nationalities,  whereas  Prussia  has  only  ex- 
panded by  suppressing  the  Danes  in  Schleswig- 
Holstein,  the  Poles  in  Posen,  the  French  in  Al- 
sace-Lorraine, the  Russian  Empire  has  again 
and  again  stood  for  the  emancipation  of  small 
nationalities.  Most  of  the  wars  of  Russia  have 
been  holy  crusades,  wars  for  the  liberation  of 
other  countries.  The  Battle  of  Navarino  gave 
freedom  to  Greece.  The  Turkish-Russian  War 
of  1878  gave  freedom  to  Roumania,  Serbia,  and 
Bulgaria.  If  we  study  closely  the  historical 
record  of  the  Russian  Empire,  we  come  to  the 

74 


RUSSIA  AS  THE  LIBERATOR      75 

conclusion  that  Russia,  almost  as  much  as 
France,  has  been  the  great  crusading  nation  of 
history.  The  glorious  title  of  "Tsar  Osvobo- 
ditel,"  or  "liberator  Tsar,"  which  is  inscribed 
on  the  statue  of  Alexander  II  in  the  Govern- 
ment Square  at  Sofia,  has  been  earned  in  like 
measure  by  Alexander  I  and  by  Alexander  II. 

II.  The  Tragedy  of  Poland 

In  at  least  one  case  Russia  has  been  guilty  of 
an  odious  crime  against  a  weaker  nationality. 
The  suppression  and  oppression  of  Poland  is 
the  dark  spot  in  the  political  history  of  the  Rus- 
sian Empire,  even  as  the  oppression  of  Ireland  is 
the  dark  spot  in  the  history  of  the  British  Em- 
pire. In  both  cases  the  oppression  has  been 
largely  a  case  of  religious  intolerance,  and  has 
been  partly  a  tragic  inheritance  of  the  past. 
But  in  the  case  of  Poland  it  is  not  Russia,  but 
Prussia,  who  is  the  main  culprit.  It  was  Fred- 
erick the  Great  who  took  the  initiative  of  the 
partition  of  Poland,  and  who  secured  and  com- 
pelled the  complicity  both  of  Russia  and  Aus- 
tria. 

Maria  Theresa,  after  the  partition  of  Poland, 
prophesied  only  too  accurately  all  the  evil  con- 
sequences which  would  result  from  the  crime. 


76  GREAT  RUSSIA 

But  Maria  Theresa,  however  penitent,  never 
surrendered  the  spoils.  Russia,  on  the  con- 
trary, again  and  again  offered  to  restore  the 
independence  of  Poland.  It  was  the  dream 
of  Alexander  I  to  re-establish  an  autonomous 
Polish  kingdom.  All  his  efforts  proved  of  no 
avail,  partly  owing  to  Prussian  influence,  partly 
owing  to  the  uncompromising  attitude  of  the 
Polish  patriots.  After  the  Revolution  of  1830 
the  opportunity  passed  away,  and  the  Russian 
Government  entered  an  era  of  reaction,  and 
from  1815  to  the  present  day  the  history  of  the 
relations  between  Russia  and  Poland  has  been 
a  succession  of  lamentable  misunderstandings 
and  political  blunders. 

But,  however  severely  we  may  condemn  Rus- 
sian misgovernment  in  Poland,  Russian  policy 
has  been  enlightened  compared  to  Prussian  mis- 
government  in  Posen.  Whilst  Alexander  II 
did  for  the  Polish  peasantry  what  Great 
Britain  was  to  do  forty  years  after  for  the 
Irish  peasantry,  whilst  he  transferred,  with  the 
assistance  of  Nicolas  Miloutine,  the  Polish 
land  from  the  Polish  nobles  to  the  Polish  peas- 
ants, and  tried  to  create  a  class  of  Polish 
peasant  proprietors,  Prussia  systematically  at- 
tempted to  expropriate  the  Polish  peasantry, 


RUSSIA  AS  THE  LIBERATOR     77 

and  transfer  the  Polish  land  to  German  settlers. 
And  whilst  Prussian  Poland  has  been  sacrificed 
to  Prussian  interests,  Russian  Poland  has  be- 
come the  richest  and  most  thriving  province 
of  the  Russian  Empire. 

It  is  true  that  even  that  prosperity  has  not 
reconciled  the  Poles  to  the  rule  of  an  alien  Gov- 
ernment and  to  the  loss  of  their  national  tradi- 
tions, of  their  political  and  religious  freedom. 
The  Russian  Government  have  understood  in 
the  end,  under  the  pressure  of  national  danger, 
that  a  great  Slav  nation  with  the  glorious  past 
of  Poland  cannot  be  reconciled,  and  will  not 
be  satisfied  until  it  has  recovered  complete  au- 
tonomy. That  autonomy  is  coming  at  last. 
One  of  the  first  pronouncements  of  the  Russian 
Government  at  the  beginning  of  the  war  was 
the  new  charter  of  Polish  freedom.  Like  the 
war  of  18 12  liberating  Europe,  like  the  war  of 
1825  liberating  Greece,  like  the  war  of  1878 
liberating  Bulgaria,  the  war  of  IQ15  will  ulti- 
mately be  a  war  of  emancipation.  The  Treaty 
of  Peace  which  will  destroy  German  milita- 
rism will  also  culminate  in  the  reconciliation  of 
the  two  great  representatives  of  the  Slavonic 
stock,  who  both  in  the  past  have  been  the  vic- 
tims of  Teutonic  militarism. 


78  GREAT  RUSSIA 

III.  The  Quixotic  Foreign  Policy 
of  Russia 

Russia  has  not  only  defended  the  rights  of 
small  nationalities,  she  has  also  consistently  fol- 
lowed a  disinterested  foreign  policy.  Accord- 
ing to  his  lights,  the  Russian  statesman  has 
been  a  good  European;  he  has  waged  war  not 
in  pursuance  of  national  ends,  but  of  general 
ends.  There  is  even  a  great  deal  to  be  said 
in  favour  of  the  theories  which  the  Slavophil 
Danilewski  expounded  in  his  famous  book 
"  Russia  and  Europe."  For  the  Russian  pol- 
icy has  been  frequently  Quixotic  and  regard- 
v  less  of  Russian  interests.  At  the  beginning  of 
the  nineteenth  century  the  one  end  of  Russian 
policy  was  to  liberate  the  world  from  the 
tyranny  of  Napoleon.  The  Tsar  might  have 
divided  the  spoils  with  his  ally  of  Tilsit.  Rus- 
sia resisted  the  arch-tempter  and  persistently 
saved  an  ungrateful  Prussia  from  annihilation. 
But  even  more  wonderful  than  the  disinter- 
estedness of  Russia  has  been  her  restraint  and 
moderation  in  victory.  After  the  invasion  of 
France,  Bliicher  insisted  on  continuing  the  war 
to  the  bitter  end.  What  Russia  considered 
as  a  war  of  liberation  Prussia  considered  as  a 


RUSSIA  AS  THE  LIBERATOR     79 

war  of  revenge.  He  even  proposed  a  punitive 
expedition  against  Paris  and  to  blow  up  the 
Tena  Bridge  in  mere  wanton  vindictiveness. 
Alexander  I  insisted  that  not  a  stone  of  the 
French  capital  should  be  touched,  although  the 
French  armies  only  two  years  before  had  de- 
stroyed Moscow,  the  heart  and  sanctuary  of 
Holy  Russia.  Prussia  also  demanded  that  a 
despotic  Government  should  be  imposed  upon 
the  French  people,  even  as  in  1873  Bismarck 
demanded  that  a  revolutionary  Government 
should  be  imposed  on  the  French  people. 
Alexander  I  insisted  that  the  Bourbons  should 
grant  a  constitutional  Government. 

Unfortunately  the  disinterested  foreign  pol- 
icy of  Russia  was  generally  placed  at  the  serv- 
ice of  Prussia  and  Austria.  On  the  assumption 
that  a  political  understanding  of  the  three  Con- 
servative Empires  was  a  necessary  condition  of 
the  preservation  of  law  and  order,  Russia  made 
common  cause  with  her  neighbours.  As  M.  de 
Wesselitsky  recently  abundantly  proved  in  his 
illuminating  book,  the  Triple  Alliance  has  been 
the  most  sinister  influence  of  Russian  and  Euro- 
pean politics  in  the  nineteenth  century,  and  the 
only  Power  to  profit  by  the  Alliance  of  the 
Emperors  was  the  Kingdom  of  Prussia.     No 


80  GREAT  RUSSIA 

wonder  that  the  expression  travailler  pour  le 
Roi  de  Prusse  should  have  become  as  proverbial 
in  Russia  as  in  France. 

The  huge  area  of  the  Russian  Empire  has 
naturally  encouraged  the  belief  that  Russian 
policy  is  determined  by  lust  of  territory,  that 
Russia  must  be  systematically  aggressive,  and 
must  have  ever  encroached  on  her  neighbours. 
We  forget  that  Russia  is  only  obeying  the  irre- 
sistible expansion  of  the  race,  that  Russia  al- 
ready in  the  seventeenth  century  had  reached 
the  far  eastern  plains  of  Asia.  We  forget 
that  the  growth  of  Russia  is  but  the  natural 
growth  of  a  prolific  race  which  increases  at  pres- 
ent at  the  rate  of  more  than  three  millions  a 
year,  notwithstanding  an  enormous  infant  mor- 
tality. Even  if  Russia  did  not  add  one  square 
mile  to  her  territory,  her  population  in  twenty- 
five  years  would  still  have  increased  by  one  hun- 
dred millions.  But  notwithstanding  that  enor- 
mous accretion  of  population,  Russia  for  the 
last  hundred  years  has  not  expanded  in  Eu- 
rope, and  her  expansion  outside  of  Europe  is 
small  compared  with  the  expansion  of  the  Brit- 
ish Empire.  The  huge  Siberian  plain  was  a 
terra  nullius  and  the  hinterland  of  the  Euro- 
pean plain. 


RUSSIA  AS  THE  LIBERATOR  81 
(We  have  seen  that  the  chief  national  aim 
of  Russian  foreign  policy  from  the  times  of 
Peter  the  Great  has  been  the  acquisition  of  a 
harbour  on  the  open  sea.  )That  aim  is  per- 
fectly justified.  The  wonder  is  not  that  Rus- 
sia should  have  pursued  that  policy  undiscour- 
aged  by  persistent  obstacles,  but  that  she  should 
have  had  to  wait  for  two  centuries  before 
achieving  her  ends.  The  present  war  has 
proved  once  more  how  her  national  security, 
her  trade  and  industry,  are  at  the  mercy  of  her 
enemies  for  want  of  an  outlet  on  the  sea.  For 
want  of  an  outlet  on  the  sea  Russia  through- 
out the  war  has  been  at  the  mercy  of  Germany 
and  Turkey,  and  has  been  unable  to  equip  her 
heroic  armies.  Great  Britain  in  the  past  has 
thwarted  legitimate  Russian  aspirations,  she 
has  sacrificed  the  Balkan  nationalities  to  the 
unspeakable  Turk;  Great  Britain  is  now  pay- 
ing the  penalty,  and  is  now  discovering  that 
she  also  through  her  anti-Russian  policy  in  the 
past  has  only  played  the  game  of  the  King  of 
Prussia. 


CHAPTER  IX 

RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  PEACE 
AND  PROGRESS 

I 

FROM  the  foregoing  considerations  it  is 
obvious  that  those  who  denounce  the 
aggressive  policy  of  the  Russian  Gov- 
ernment are  little  acquainted  either  with  Rus- 
sian history  or  with  the  Russian  character. 

The  history  of  Russian  expansion  has  been 
one  mainly  of  peaceful  penetration.  Even  to- 
day over  a  million  peasants  cross  the  Ural 
Mountains  every  year  to  settle  in  Siberia.  The 
providential  mission  of  Russia  seems  to  be  the 
colonization  of  the  semi-barbarous  populations 
of  the  Asiatic  continent.  And  in  that  mission 
the  Russian  people  have  been  eminently  suc- 
cessful. The  Russian  is  the  ideal  settler.  He 
does  not  possess  the  commercial  instinct  of  the 
Jew  or  of  the  Armenians;  he  does  not  possess 
the  industrial  capacities  of  the  Anglo-Saxon. 
But  as  an  agriculturist,  as  a  colonist,  he  is  un- 
surpassed. 

82 


RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  PROGRESS     83 

A  peaceful  policy  is  in  conformity  with  the- 
Russian  character.  The  most  typical  Russian 
writer  is  also  the  most  uncompromising  apostle 
of  peace.  There  is  nothing  aggressive  in  the 
Russian  temperament.  Its  strength  lies  in  pa- 
tience and  stoical  endurance,  in  passive  resist- 
ance. Even  the  military  history  of  Russia  il- 
lustrates that  character.  The  French  and  the 
Germans  are  strong  in  the  offensive,  the  Rus- 
sians are  mainly  strong  on  the  defensive.  The 
war  of  1812,  the  retreat  to  Moscow,  the  dra- 
matic duel  between  Napoleon  and  Kutusov, 
are  striking  illustrations  of  that  characteristic  in 
the  national  temperament. 

To-day  more  than  ever  peace  is  a  Russian 
necessity.  Russia  is  only  at  the  beginning  of 
her  industrial  expansion,  and  she  has  still  to 
pass  through  the  ordeal  of  a  profound  political 
transformation.  She  needs  peace  to  exploit 
her  immense  resources.  She  needs  peace  even 
more  urgently  to  carry  her  political  experiments 
to  a  successful  issue.  At  the  beginning  of  his 
reign,  Nicholas  II,  in  issuing  his  famous  peace 
rescript,  took  the  initiative  of  the  modern  peace 
movement  and  of  the  Hague  Conference.  It 
is  not  the  fault  of  Russia,  but  of  Prussia,  that 
the  Hague  Conferences  should  have  failed  in 


84  GREAT  RUSSIA 

their  object,  and  that  the  ideals  of  Nicholas  II 
should  have  remained  a  noble  dream.  The 
crushing  of  German  militarism  will  make  the 
dream  of  the  White  Tsar  a  glorious  reality. 

II 

In  the  opinion  of  the  average  Englishman,  Rus- 
sia is  identified  with  reaction.  The  Russian 
moujik  we  are  told  is  a  clumsy,  unwieldy 
giant,  who  is  only  beginning  to  stretch  his  limbs. 
Russia  moves  as  slowly  as  her  own  rivers,  so 
sluggish  that  it  is  almost  impossible  to  tell  in 
which  direction  the  currents  move. 

Like  most  other  ideas  about  Russia,  this  con- 
ception of  a  reactionary  Russia  is  a  delusion. 
So  far  from  being  stationary  Russia  is,  per- 
haps, the  most  progressive  nation  in  Europe, 
and  her  rapid  advance  has  only  been  paralleled 
by  the  advance  of  America.  Only  two  hun- 
dred years  ago  the  Russian  Empire  was  still 
plunged  in  utter  darkness.  At  the  beginning 
of  the  eighteenth  century  the  Russian  Govern- 
ment was  of  so  little  account  that  when  Peter 
the  Great  offered  to  visit  the  Court  of  Versailles, 
he  met  with  a  polite  refusal.  To-day  the  suc- 
cessors of  Louis  XIV  celebrate  a  visit  of  the 
Russian  Tsar  as  a  great  national  event. 


RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  PROGRESS     85 

Everything  in  Russia  has  had  to  be  built  up 
in  a  few  generations.  The  Trans-Siberian 
Railway  is  as  stupendous  an  achievement  as  the 
Canadian  Pacific  Railway.  The  cyclopean 
highway  through  the  Caucasus  is  one  of  the 
wonders  of  modem  engineering.  Ten  years 
ago  I  witnessed  for  six  months  the  horrors  of 
the  Civil  War  and  the  disasters  of  the  Japanese 
War.  Returning  to  Petrograd  after  five  years 
I  expected  to  find  a  ruined,  disorganized  State. 
I  found  instead  an  extraordinary  change  for  the 
better:  the  public  exchequer  full  to  overflow- 
ing, a  thriving  industry,  universal  optimism,  a 
superb  confidence  in  the  future.  We  notice  the 
same  progress  in  every  province  of  human  ac- 
tivity. No  British  newspaper  would  think  it 
worth  while  to  report  about  those  twenty  thou- 
sand agricultural  co-operative  societies  which 
have  risen  in  recent  years  in  the  Empire  of 
the  Tsars.  One  Nihilist  plot  or  one  Jewish 
Pogrom  would  have  attracted  more  attention. 
Yet  think  of  the  enormous  significance  of  those 
twenty  thousand  autonomous  social  organiza- 
tions which  everywhere  are  reforming  agricul- 
tural methods  and  stimulating  the  most  impor- 
tant national  industry. 

Russia  is  the  country  of  gigantic  social  and 


86  GREAT  RUSSIA 

political  experiments.  To  use  the  three  favour- 
ite expressions  of  the  German  megalomaniacs, 
everything  in  Russia  is  "Kolossal,"  "grossar- 
tig,"  "im  grossen  Stil."  There  is  no  parallel 
in  history,  to  the  emancipation  of  the  serfs,  or 
to  that  expropriation  of  the  Polish  landlords, 
with  which  the  name  of  Nicholas  Milutin  is  as- 
sociated. By  one  stroke  of  the  Imperial  pen 
forty  million  peasants  were  liberated,  and  tens 
of  millions  of  acres  of  land  changed  hands. 
The  recent  far-reaching  prohibition  measure  is 
another  bold  innovation  of  the  Russian  Gov- 
ernment. In  other  countries  thousands  of  en- 
thusiasts have  been  speaking  about  temperance 
reform  and  denouncing  the  appalling  results  of 
the  drink  evil.  The  Russian  Government 
alone  has  had  the  courage  of  grappling  with  the 
evil,  and  that  courage  is  all  the  more  admirable 
because  in  suppressing  the  sale  of  vodka  the 
Russian  Government  have  deprived  themselves 
of  one-fourth  of  the  Imperial  revenue.  Surely 
two  such  far-reaching  achievements,  either 
promised  or  accomplished  in  the  throes  of  a 
great  war — the  charter  of  Polish  freedom  and 
the  prohibition  of  vodka  are  of  good  omen  for 
the  future  liberation  of  the  Russian  people. 


RUSSIA  STANDS  FOR  PROGRESS     87 

III.  The  Coming  of  the  Slav 

After  a  thousand  years  of  striving  and  suffer- 
ing, of  oppression  and  suppression,  the  Russian 
is  at  last  coming  into  his  inheritance.  This 
war,  which  will  end  in  the  collapse  of  the  three 
Empires,  Prussia,  Austria,  and  Turkey,  will 
also  result  in  the  advance  of  the  Russian  Em- 
pire as  the  controlling  power  of  Continental 
Europe.  The  future  Peace  Congress  will  real- 
ize the  dream  of  ages.  Byzantium  Tsargrad 
will  become  the  capital  of  Holy  Russia. 

But  Europe  need  take  no  umbrage.  The 
Russian  Empire  of  to-morrow  will  not  be  a  cen- 
tralized military  Power  like  Rome  or  Germany. 
It  will  take  the  form  of  a  federation  of  self- 
governing  communities.  The  logic  of  the  Slav 
political  tradition,  the  pressure  of  economic  and 
political  circumstances,  the  shaking  off  of  the 
German  influence,  the  influence  of  the  allied 
democracies,  all  point  to  a  Liberal  Orientation 
of  Russian  politics. 

The  other  Slav  States  will  be  finally  liber- 
ated. Poland,  Serbia,  Bulgaria  will  be  drawn 
into  the  orbit  of  the  leading  Power  to  which 
they  owe  their  independent  national  existence. 
Russian  influence  will  be  all  the  stronger  as 


88  GREAT  RUSSIA 

it  ceases  to  be  a  menace  to  their  independence. 
Attracted  by  the  affinities  of  language  and  race, 
of  religion  and  tradition,  the  Slav  communities 
will  constitute  one  integral  whole,  the  United 
States  of  Eastern  and  Southern  Europe. 

That  federation  of  Slavonic  States  will  be 
the  dominant  power  in  the  old  Continent,  and 
the  other  States  will  have  to  follow  their  lead. 
The  economic  and  political  interests  of  the  other 
nations  will  be  so  closely  identified  with  the  fu- 
ture of  Russia,  that  they  will  have  to  seek  a 
closer  political  understanding  and  to  constitute, 
in  combination  with  Russia,  those  United 
States  of  Europe  which  hitherto  had  been  the 
vain  political  dream  of  generations  of  idealists 
and  visionaries. 


PART  III 
The  Great  Russian  Triumvirate 


CHAPTER  X 

TURGENEV  AND  WESTERN 
INFLUENCES 

I.  Russian  Ideals  as  Revealed 
by  Russian  Literature 

IN  the  previous  chapters  I  have  attempted 
to  give  the  meaning  of  the  political 
achievements  of  the  Russian  people,  and 
to  vindicate  the  prominent  place  which  they 
may  claim  in  the  history  of  modern  civiliza- 
tion. I  have  described  the  guiding  principles 
which,  amidst  many  errors  and  deflections,  have 
directed  Russian  policy.  I  have  also  shown 
how  the  internal  and  external  policy  of  the 
Government  is  rooted  in  the  ideas  and  aspira- 
tions of  the  people,  and  how  those  ideas  have 
been  affected  by  the  peculiar  geographical  and 
physiographical  conditions  of  the  Russian  Em- 
pire. No  survey  of  Russian  history  would, 
however,  be  complete  which  would  fail  to  ex- 
plain, however  briefly,  how  those  Russian  ideals 
and  inspirations  have  found  adequate  expres- 
sion in  the  masterpieces  of  Russian  literature. 

9i  / 


92  GREAT  RUSSIA 

In  one  sense  it  may  be  asserted  that  the  Rus- 
sian people  are  inarticulate,  as  the  great  mass 
of  the  people  are  illiterate  peasants.  But  the 
instincts  and  aspirations  of  those  inarticulate 
peasants  have  been  voiced  by  some  of  the  great- 
est creative  artists  of  world  literature.  No 
modern  literature  certainly  can  boast  of  pro- 
ducing in  one  and  the  same  generation  such  a 
triumvirate  as  Turgenev,  Tolstoy,  and  Dos- 
toevsky.  To  outward  view  there  seems  very 
little  in  common  between  them:  yet  all  three 
writers  are  pre-eminently  representative  men. 
Turgenev  is  an  agnostic  and  a  Liberal,  a  cynic 
and, a  sceptic,  enamoured  of  Western  habits 
and  ideas,  and  he  spent  the  greater  part  of  his 
life  outside  of  Russia.  Tolstoy  is  a  believer, 
an  enthusiast  and  a  passionate  reformer,  and 
he  spent  all  his  life  between  Moscow  and  his 
paternal  estate.  Dostoevsky's  life  is  a  pa- 
thetic tale  of  hardship  and  suffering.  An  epi- 
leptic on  the  verge  of  insanity,  he  spent  part 
of  his  life  in  prison  and  in  exile.  Yet  those 
three  great  writers,  so  different  in  their  per- 
sonal characteristics,  are  bound  by  a  unity  of 
ideals.  They  are  all  characterized  by  the  same 
Russian  depth,  the  same  love  of  reality  and 
veracity.     They  have  all  the  same  hatred  of 


WESTERN  INFLUENCES  93 

cant  and  convention;  they  have  all  the  same 
unconquerable  love  of  freedom;  they  are  all 
democrats  and  pacifists.  And  although  typical 
Russians,  they  are  equally  good  Europeans. 
Although  educated  in  the  darkest  days  of  po- 
litical reaction,  they  all  have  the  same  generous 
and  magnanimous  belief  in  humanity.  They 
all  repudiate  the  gospel  of  Prussianism;  they 
are  all  in  communion  and  sympathy  with  the 
common  people.  And  if  we  may  judge  of  the 
aspirations  of  the  Russian  nation  from  the 
writings  of  her  greatest  sons,  we  can  be  left  in 
no  doubt  as  to  the  ultimate  Orientation  of  the 
Russian  people. 

II 

Russian  literature  is  the  finest  of  all  heroic 
literatures.  No  other  has  raised  to  a  higher 
level  the  dignity  of  a  novelist.  The  Russian 
novelist  is  at  the  same  time  a  man  of  thought 
and  a  man  of  action.  He  has  a  cure  of  souls; 
he  is  an  apostle.  The  Russian  novel  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  like  the  French  novel  of 
the  eighteenth,  has  been  the  chief  and  almost 
the  only  instrument  of  political  and  social  free- 
dom. The  novel  in  Russia  under  Nicholas  I 
took  the  place  of  the  newspaper,  the  pulpit,  and 


94  GREAT  RUSSIA 

the  platform,  for  under  his  autocratic  Govern- 
ment the  Press  was  gagged,  the  Church  had 
sold  her  birthright  for  a  mess  of  pottage,  and 
no  Duma  existed. 

Nothing  is  more  sad  or  more  tragic,  more 
monotonous,  and  at  the  same  time  more  touch- 
ing and  more  glorious,  than  the  life-story  of 
Russian  writers  of  an  earlier  generation. 
Nearly  all  these  lives  resemble  one  another. 
What  a  lamentable  list  of  martyrs!  Radi- 
schef,  one  of  the  first  who  dared  to  expose  the 
horrors  of  serfdom,  exiled  to  Siberia  by  Cath- 
erine the  Great  and  forced  into  committing 
suicide!  Pushkin  and  Lermontov  killed  in 
a  duel!  Griboiedov  assassinated!  Bielinski, 
the  greatest  of  critics,  Soloviov,  the  greatest  of 
philosophers,  and  Chekhov,  the  most  celebrated 
of  story  writers,  carried  off  prematurely  by 
a  pitiless  climate!  Herzen,  Saltikov,  Tcher- 
nitchevski,  and  Kropotkin  condemned  to  exile ! 
Dostoevsky,  sentenced  to  the  mines — damnatus 
ad  metalla — and  spending  the  best  of  his  years 
in  "The  House  of  the  Dead."  Plescheeff,  Pi- 
sarev,  Maxim  Gorky,  put  in  prison!  All  sus- 
pected, hunted,  and  condemned  under  a  hostile 
Government  to  a  life  of  sickness  and  misery. 

On  this  list  of  martyrs,  in  this  struggle  for 


WESTERN  INFLUENCES         95 

freedom  of  thought  and  of  conscience,  Tur- 
genev  occupies,  in  spite  of  his  failings,  a  place 
of  honour.  He  also  knew  what  prison  life 
meant.  He  was  exiled  to  his  distant  property. 
He  was  placed  under  police  vigilance,  and  if 
he  suffered  less  than  others  from  the  harshness 
of  those  in  power  it  is  because  he  put  the  fron- 
tier between  himself  and  the  police.  Far  from 
his  country,  he  continued  to  fight  the  good  fight. 

Ill 

Born  in  1818,  that  is  ten  years  before  Tolstoy, 
in  the  Province  of  Orel,  in  old  Russia,  and  on 
the  borders  of  that  black  soil  which  is  the 
granary  of  Europe,  Turgenev  belonged  to  the 
illustrious  liberal  and  liberating  generation 
of  the  forties.  Attaining  his  intellectual  ma- 
jority when  the  despotic  power  of  Nicholas  I 
was  at  its  height,  he  bore  the  marks  of  that  ter- 
rible regime^  and  the  misery  of  serfhood 
branded  itself  indelibly  upon  his  soul.  De- 
scended from  the  country  aristocracy,  and  bred 
of  a  long  line  of  noblemen,  he  was  the  last  wit- 
ness of  feudal  customs,  and  became  the  acknowl- 
edged chronicler  of  a  society  now  for  ever  abol- 
ished. A  sad  childhood  was  his,  whose  mem- 
ory   served    to   darken   his    whole    life.     His 


96  GREAT  RUSSIA 

father  was  a  rake.  His  mother,  a  strange,  des- 
potic woman,  who  lorded  it  over  an  estate  of 
5000  souls,  quarrelled  with  him,  and  never 
forgave  him  for  losing  caste  by  becoming  an 
author,  when  he  might  have  achieved  a  bril- 
liant military  career  in  the  Tchin.  He  re- 
ceived a  double  education — a  la  frangaise,  at 
the  hands  of  indifferent  preceptors  and  dancing 
masters,  and  a  la  Tartare,  that  is,  at  the  point 
of  the  lash.  At  eighteen  he  was  glad  to  escape 
from  the  maternal  home,  with  its  atmosphere 
of  violence  and  servility,  and  to  make  his  way 
first  to  Moscow  for  a  season  of  pleasure,  then 
to  Petrograd  to  taste  the  comparative  lib- 
erty of  student  life.  These  were  the  darkest 
days  of  political  despotism,  and  the  temptation 
to  breathe  the  air  of  freer  lands  was  very 
strong.  At  twenty  Turgenev  left  Russia,  and 
spent  three  years  at  the  University  of  Berlin. 

IV 

This  first  absence  of  three  years  determined  his 
future  life.  On  his  return  to  Russia  he  could 
no  longer  breathe  his  native  air,  at  twenty-nine 
years  of  age,  in  1847,  he  returned  to  a  wan- 
dering life,  and  left  his  country  for  good,  re- 
turning to  it  only  for  a  few  weeks  each  year  in 


WESTERN  INFLUENCES         97 

order  to  settle  his  business  affairs.  And  if  at 
first  the  love  of  his  native  land  seized  upon  the 
exile  and  brought  him  back  for  a  time  to  Spass- 
koi,  the  tyrannical  reign  of  Nicholas  did  its 
best  to  kill  these  regrets.  In  1852,  the  day 
after  the  publication  of  "A  Sportsman's 
Sketches,"  he  received  in  prison,  as  did  every 
ame  bien  nee  in  the  Russia  of  those  days,  his 
baptism  of  liberty.  His  crime  was  the  discreet 
praise  he  had  given  to  Gogol  and  his  "Dead 
Souls,"  just  as  Lermontov  had  been  punished 
for  praising  Pushkin.  It  was  a  warning. 
From  henceforth  Turgenev  was  cured  of  his 
nostalgia.  He  became  more  and  more  "West- 
ernized." For  years  he  wandered  across  Eu- 
rope in  the  pursuit  of  his  artistic  ideal,  and  in 
the  train  of  Madame  Viardot,  the  famous  prima 
donna  and  sister  of  Malibran,  to  whom  he  was 
united  by  a  friendship  which  death  alone  was 
to  end.  He  resided  alternately  in  Germany 
and  France,  and  built  himself  a  villa  at  Baden- 
Baden.  He,  the  Scythian  and  the  Tartar,  be- 
came a  type  of  the  uprooted  absentee  landlord. 
Far  from  Russia,  he  understood  her  no  more, 
and  was  no  more  understood  by  her,  and  he 
lived  to  be  depreciated  and  disowned  by  the 
coming  generation  of  his  compatriots. 


98  GREAT  RUSSIA 

After  1870  he  left  Germany,  and  settled  per- 
manently in  Paris,  and  France  was  grateful  to 
the  stranger  who  preferred  the  hospitality  of 
the  Conquered  to  that  of  the  Conqueror.  An 
intimate  friend  of  Flaubert,  who  had  organized 
in  his  honour  the  famous  dinners  at  Magny,  of 
which  Edmond  de  Goncourt  became  the  chron- 
icler (see  "The  Diary  of  the  Goncourts"),  trans- 
lated by  Merimee,  extolled  by  About  and 
George  Sand,  by  Taine  and  Renan,  recognized 
as  a  master  by  Zola  and  Daudet,  Turgenev 
became  almost  a  French  classic,  and  the  first  on 
the  lists  of  the  new  realistic  and  naturalistic 
school.  In  spite  of  such  adulation  and  affec- 
tion, exile  was  not  good  for  him.  His  popu- 
larity in  France,  besides  being  a  little  artificial, 
could  never  reconcile  him  to  his  unpopularity 
at  home,  and  he  carried  in  his  heart  till  death 
the  wound  struck  by  an  alienated  and  ungrate- 
ful country.  His  mental  sufferings,  his  irregu- 
lar life  had  prematurely  undermined  his  vig- 
orous constitution.  Turgenev  died  in  1883, 
after  years  of  excruciating  suffering  caused  by 
cancer  of  the  spinal  cord.  By  a  strange  irony 
of  fate,  he  who  lived  as  a  disregarded  exile  re- 
turned after  death  to  his  native  country,  and 
Russia,  who  had  disowned  him,  gave  to  his  dead 


WESTERN  INFLUENCES         99 

body  the  honours  she  had  refused  to  his 
genius. 

V 

It  is  important  for  an  understanding  of  Tur- 
genev  to  trace  the  main  currents  of  his  tortured 
existence,  to  remember  at  what  date  and  under 
what  influences  each  of  his  books  came  into 
being,  and,  above  all,  to  recall  the  successive 
environments  in  which  his  lot  was  cast:  Old 
Russia,  the  Black  Soil,  Serfdom,  German  Uni- 
versities, the  Russian  Colony  of  Baden,  the  cos- 
mopolitan society  of  Paris.  For  Turgenev  was 
a  chronicler.  He  could  only  describe  with  mi- 
croscopic minuteness  what  he  had  seen,  and 
make  the  scenes  he  had  actually  passed  through 
live  again.  If  he  had  had  the  magnifying  im- 
agination of  a  Balzac  or  of  a  Dickens,  he  would 
have  transformed  actuality;  if  he  had  had  the 
historical  imagination  of  Walter  Scott,  he 
would  have  taken  refuge  in  "the  past";  if  he 
had  had  the  reforming  and  Christian  tempera- 
ment of  Tolstoy,  his  books  would  have  been 
speeches  and  discussions.  But  Turgenev  had 
none  of  these.  On  the  one  hand  he  had  scarcely 
any  creative  faculty;  on  the  other  hand,  he  was 
entirely  detached  from  all  positive  Christianity. 


ioo  GREAT  RUSSIA 

He  was  a  complete  Nihilist  in  religion,  and 
even  in  politics  he  disclaimed  any  didactic  in- 
tention. Possessing  to  a  supreme  degree  the 
genius  of  observation  and  of  psychological  anal- 
ysis, he  contented  himself  with  reproducing  the 
reality  which  surrounded  him,  and  the  society 
and  personalities  which  he  knew.  This  sur- 
rounding reality,  this  society,  and  these  person- 
alities he  saw  thus  through  an  artistic  tempera- 
ment, which  received  its  profoundest  impres- 
sions from  its  environment.  To  understand 
this  temperament  of  his,  his  moral  physiog- 
nomy, his  jarring  discords,  his  eccentricities,  his 
contrasts,  one  must  transport  oneself  to  the  Rus- 
sia of  former  days. 

Tradition  has  it  that  Turgenev  was  a  fa- 
therly and  patriarchal  "grand  old  man,"  six 
feet  in  height,  with  white  hair  and  a  flowing 
beard,  the  soul  of  a  child  in  the  body  of  a  giant, 
full  of  kindness  and  good  nature,  ingenuousness, 
and  simplicity.  In  reality,  no  one  was  less  in- 
genuous than  Turgenev,  as  Daudet  and  Zola 
learnt  to  their  sorrow.  The  simplicity  of  the 
Slav  in  him  was  mingled  with  the  duplicity  of 
the  Byzantine. 

Turgenev  is  full  of  contradictions  and  fun- 
damentally obscure;  and  these  contradictions 


WESTERN  INFLUENCES        101 

explain  the  contradictory  judgments  of  which 
he  has  been  the  subject,  especially  in  Russia, 
on  the  part  of  the  Slavophiles,  as  well  as  the 
"Zapadniki."  He  is  at  once  a  mystic  and  a 
mystifier,  an  enthusiast  and  a  sceptic,  keen  on 
revolution,  and  yet  without  illusions  concern- 
ing revolutionaries  ("Fathers  and  Children"); 
gentle  and  violent;  a  believer  in  ideas,  and  yet 
knowing  all  the  time  that  these  ideas  will  be 
dissipated  in  "smoke."     ("Smoke.") 

Very  intelligent,  very  yielding,  and  very  fee- 
ble, he  was  always  influenced  by  his  surround- 
ings. Very  young  and  very  old,  at  once  bar- 
baric and  refined,  he  is  the  product  of  a 
civilization  which  had  a  fitful  and  irregular  de- 
velopment. When  it  was  the  fashion  to  be 
Byronic,  and  to  assume  a  romantic  pose,  Tur- 
genev  startled  Herzen  and  Tolstoy  by  his  dan- 
dified affectation  as  he  sported  an  eyeglass  in 
the  Perspective  Nevski.  When  he  was  in  Ger- 
many he  was  a  Gallophobe.  When  he  was  in 
Paris  he  was  a  Gallophile ;  yet  he  did  not  hesi- 
tate to  write  some  very  bitter  criticisms  on  the 
country  of  his  adoption  to  his  friends  in  Russia. 

In  fine,  his  was  a  nature  wavering  and  com- 
plex, a  character  profoundly  sympathetic,  but 
undecided  and  vacillating,  a  luminous  intelli- 


102  GREAT  RUSSIA 

gence,  but  lacking  focus.  His  virtues  really 
belonged  to  him ;  his  faults  he  owed  to  his  edu- 
cation, and  to  the  demoralizing  conditions  of 
his  exiled  and  uprooted  existence. 

And  as  these  conditions  explained  in  a  great 
measure  the  personality  of  the  novelist,  they 
also  explained  the  physiognomy  of  his  charac- 
ters, the  atmosphere  of  his  work.  That  at- 
mosphere is  depressing,  and  the  physiognomy 
of  the  "heroes"  is  still  more  so.  These  heroes 
have  nothing  heroic  about  them.  They  are 
nearly  all  without  energy,  or  they  waste  what 
energy  they  have  in  words,  or  in  evanescent  ac- 
cessions of  violence.  They  discant  incessantly 
upon  the  Russian  genius,  its  destiny,  and  its 
superiority  over  the  European  genius;  but  they 
submit  to  all  the  indignities  of  the  present  mo- 
ment. Nearly  all  are  "Useless  Men."  (See 
"The  Diary  of  a  Superfluous  Man.")  They 
go  from  one  extreme  to  another,  not  having 
their  centre  of  gravity  within  themselves. 
They  ask  from  love  both  the  joys  and  the  suf- 
ferings of  life,  but  in  that  very  love  they  reveal 
the  same  want  of  character,  of  stability  and 
consistence. 

Sometimes  they  sacrifice  to  a  caprice  the 
woman  they  love;  sometimes  they  commit  sui- 


WESTERN  INFLUENCES        103 

cide  when  crossed  in  love,  without  any  resource 
against  temptation  or  misfortune.  This  paral- 
ysis of  the  will,  this  aboulie — no  one  has  de- 
scribed and  diagnosed  with  a  surer  penetration 
than  Turgenev,  because  he  himself  was  so  pro- 
foundly affected  by  it,  and  because  it  is  the  con- 
stitutional malady  of  the  Russian  soul.  How 
can  one  escape  being  boulique,  like  Rudin,  at 
a  time  when  the  will  of  one  individual  could 
break  everything  and  substitute  itself  for  every- 
thing"? How  could  one  help  being  fantastic, 
like  Irene,  in  a  country  where  despotism  and 
caprice  reign  supreme"?  How  can  one  avoid 
violence  and  Nihilism,  like  that  of  Bazarov, 
under  a  regime  where  nothing  could  be  obtained 
by  reason  and  persuasion,  and  where  one  must 
be  either  a  victim  or  a  despot? 

VI 

As  a  writer,  Turgenev  is  without  a  rival.  He 
is  the  purest  of  stylists,  the  first  classical  prose 
writer  of  his  country.  Like  Pushkin,  he  had 
the  most  intimate  knowledge  and  mastery  of 
the  resources  and  the  riches  of  the  Russian 
tongue.  I  remember  once,  when  in  the  Crimea, 
and  wishing  to  learn  the  Russian  language,  I 
asked  Maxim  Gorky  what  would  be  the  best 


104  GREAT  RUSSIA 

method  to  follow.  Gorky,  the  least  artistic,  the 
least  Westernized  of  writers,  sent  me  first  of  all 
to  Turgenev.  It  is  a  fact  that  foreigners  begin 
their  study  of  Russian  by  reading  Turgenev. 
It  is  he  who  initiates  them  into  the  secrets  of 
the  most  complex,  the  most  finely  graded,  the 
most  varied  and  most  subtle  of  modern  lan- 
guages— perhaps  of  all  languages  the  sole  heir 
to  the  genius  of  the  Greek  tongue. 

But  Turgenev  is  stj.ll  more;  he  is  a  master 
of  European  literature.  He  has  neither  the  in- 
spiration of  Gogol,  nor  the  epic  grandeur  or  the 
prophetic  breath  of  Tolstoy,  nor  the  profound 
tragedy  of  Dostoevsky,  nor  the  democratic  sen- 
timent of  Gorky  and  Chekhov.  His  horizon 
is  as  limited  and  monotonous  as  the  horizon  of 
the  steppes.  He  works  with  certain  ever-recur- 
ring types  of  lovers,  proprietors,  peasants,  intel- 
lectuals, and  revolutionaries.  If  his  talent  re- 
mains personal  and  original,  if  he  has  not 
(whatever  may  be  said  against  him)  copied 
from  his  predecessors,  he  is  for  ever  copying 
himself.  But  in  his  limited  world,  which  is  his 
own,  Turgenev  is  without  a  rival.  The  best 
judges  in  all  countries — Merimee,  Taine,  and 
Hennequin  in  France;  Brandes  in  Denmark; 
Henry  James  in  America;  Galsworthy  in  Eng- 


WESTERN  INFLUENCES        105 

land — have  recognized,  in  spite  of  the  obscur- 
ing medium  of  translation,  the  mastery  of  his 
art.  He  has  colour,  meaning,  order,  composi- 
tion. He  has  moderation  and  proportion.  He 
knows  how  to  sum  up  a  situation  in  a  few  lines, 
how  to  draw  a  character  with  a  few  strokes. 
He  has  none  of  the  tedious  speeches  which  make 
Dostoevsky,  and  sometimes  Tolstoy,  so  difficult 
to  read.  He  excels  in  telling  a  story.  He 
probably  inspired  Maupassant,  and  there  is  no 
doubt  that  Chekhov  owed  much  to  him. 

As  an  artist  Turgenev  seems  to  have  profited 
by  all  his  experiences,  even  by  the  harshness  of 
the  censorship ;  and  the  failings  of  mankind  min- 
istered to  his  art  no  less  than  its  virtues.  Nar- 
rowly watched  by  censors,  he  was  forced  into 
those  reticences  and  reserves,  and  into  that 
veiled  delicacy  of  illusion  which  heightens  artis- 
tic effect.  Being  a  pessimist,  he  had  no  illu- 
sions about  his  characters,  but  maintained 
throughout  a  Shakespearean  objectivity  towards 
them.  Had  he  been  more  optimistic  and  ideal- 
istic, and  more  of  a  reformer,  he  would  have 
interposed  his  own  reflections  between  his  char- 
acters and  the  reader,  using  them,  too,  as 
vehicles  of  his  own  favourite  doctrine.  But 
being  a  fatalist,  he  believed  in  the  immutability 


106  GREAT  RUSSIA 

of  his  characters,  and  made  them  all  act  ac- 
cording to  the  strict  logic  of  their  tempera- 
ments. 

It  should  be  added  that,  though  Turgenev 
contemplates  the  "Human  Comedy"  with  the 
disillusioned  smile  of  the  sceptic,  his  smile  is 
often  mixed  with  tears,  and  his  scepticism  never 
excludes  tenderness,  emotion,  and  sympathy. 
So  far  from  excluding  goodness  and  indulgence, 
his  fatalism  rather  implies  them;  for  to  him  to 
understand  all  is  to  pardon  all.  One  pre-emi- 
nently Christian  virtue  has  survived  the  ship- 
wreck of  his  Christianity — the  virtue  of  resig- 
nation, and  he  has  kept  the  best  part  of  Chris- 
tian piety,  which  is  pity.  Like  all  great  Rus- 
sian writers,  he  has,  amid  the  loss  of  many  be- 
liefs, retained  the  religion  of  human  suffering. 


CHAPTER  XI 

TOLSTOY  THE  BYZANTINE 

I 

THERE  are  a  hundred  and  forty  million 
peasants  settled  on  the  outskirts  of 
Continental  Europe,  and  rapidly  taking 
possession  of  the  Asiatic  plain.  It  seems,  in  the 
fitness  of  things,  that  Russian  expansion  should 
move  Eastwards,  for  it  seems  almost  impossible 
to  consider  the  Russian  as  belonging  to  the 
West.  We  are  loth  to  admit  him  to  the  fran- 
chise of  European  civilization.  "Scratch  a 
Russian  moujik"  we  are  told,  "and  you  find  the 
Tartar."  Let  him,  therefore,  go  back  to  Tar- 
tary,  the  cradle  of  his  race. 

The  time-honoured  saying  about  the  Russian 
Tartar  is  only  a  sorry  joke.  For  if  it  means 
that  the  Russian  peasant,  being  engaged  in  a 
perpetual  struggle  with  the  hostile  forces  of  Na- 
ture, with  drought  and  cold,  with  hunger  and 
plague,  is  nearer  to  elemental  human  nature, 
then  it  is  only  a  commonplace  and  a  misleading 
one.     For  elemental  human  nature  is  not  Tar- 

107 


y 


108  GREAT  RUSSIA 

tar,  and  the  stoical  and  heroic  struggle  with  Na- 
ture is  more  characteristic  of  the  West  than  of 
the  East.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  the  saying 
means  that  the  Russian  peasant  is  at  heart  a 
Tartar  and  a  heathen,  that  his  Christianity  is 
only  skin-deep,  then  it  entirely  misrepresents 
his  character.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  Rus- 
sian moujik  moves  and  lives  and  has  his  bear- 
ing in  Christianity. 

To  anyone  who,  like  the  writer  of  these  lines, 
has  lived  with  Russian  pilgrims  at  Kiev  or 
Jerusalem,  it  would  almost  seem  as  if  Russia 
and  Siberia  were  the  only  Christian  countries 
left  in  the  world.  In  Tolstoy's  marvellous  and 
gruesome  drama,  "The  Powers  of  Darkness," 
Christianity  is  the  one  light  which  illumines  the 
moujik  sunk  in  vice  and  degradation.  On  the 
other  hand,  if  popular  Christianity  remains  the 
great  civilizing  force,  it  is  almost  equally  true 
to  say  that  official  Christianity  has  itself  be- 
come "a  power  of  darkness."  And  it  is  one  of 
the  most  difficult  tasks  for  the  student  of  mod- 
ern Russia  to  dissociate  popular  Christianity 
from  official  Christianity.  In  Russia  religion 
and  humanity  are  to-day  working  at  cross-pur- 
poses. The  intellectual  minority  who  believe 
in  reform  do  not  believe  in  Christianity.     The 


TOLSTOY  THE  BYZANTINE       109 

masses  who  believe  in  Christianity  do  not  be- 
lieve in  reform,  and  their  religion  is  being  ex- 
ploited in  the  interests  of  a  corrupt  bureaucracy 
and  of  an  effete  Church. 

II 

There  lies,  to  my  mind,  the  deep-seated  cause 
of  the  ghastly  failure  of  the  abortive  Revolu- 
tion of  1905.  When,  eight  years  ago,  Russia 
from  the  Baltic  to  the  Pacific  was  convulsed  by 
Civil  War,  publicists  confidently  foretold  the 
imminent  downfall  of  Tsardom  and  the  tri- 
umph of  liberty.  I  had  not  been  a  month  in 
Russia  when  I  as  confidently  predicted  that  ab- 
solutely nothing  would  happen,  and  that  reac- 
tion would  emerge  from  the  crisis  more  power- 
ful than  ever.  I  realized  that  an  absolute  di- 
vorce existed  between  the  people  and  its  sup- 
posed leaders.  I  realized  that  a  band  of  ag- 
nostic doctrinaires  would  never  move  a  pro- 
foundly religious  people.  But  whilst  realizing 
the  helplessness  of  the  present  outlook,  I  felt 
equally  hopeful  for  the  future.  I  felt  that  the 
day  would  soon  come  when  the  tremendous 
spiritual  forces  latent  in  the  people  would  be 
released,  when  those  inarticulate  millions  would 
find  their  own  spokesmen  and  leaders.     Then 


no  GREAT  RUSSIA 

would  dawn  the  day  of  the  Great  Russian  Rev- 
olution, compared  with  which  even  the  French 
Revolution  would  have  been  only  a  minor  epi- 
sode. 

Ill 

If  it  is  entirely  misleading  to  say  that  "to 
scratch  a  Russian  peasant  is  to  find  the  Tar- 
tar," it  is  entirely  true  to  say  "that  if  you  scratch 
the  Russian  nobleman  you  find  the  Byzantine." 
And  if  it  is  pretty  easy  to  understand  the  mou- 
jik>  even  though  you  may  never  have  seen  a 
single  exemplar  of  the  type,  it  is  extremely 
difficult  to  understand  a  Russian  Intellectual, 
even  though  you  may  have  met  him  in  every 
corner  of  Europe,  either  as  a  rich  absentee  or 
as  a  poor  refugee. 

When,  seven  hundred  years  ago,  the  Cru- 
saders first  came  into  touch  with  the  Greek  Em- 
pire, they  were  bewildered  by  the  mental  com- 
plexity and  perversity  of  the  rulers  and  of  the 
people  of  Byzantium.  And  the  Byzantine 
soon  became  a  byword  for  duplicity  and  per- 
fidious subtlety.  There  is  a  great  deal  of  the 
Byzantine  about  the  educated  Russian.  Like 
the  mediaeval  Greek,  he  is  elusive  and  evasive. 
He  is  a  bundle  of  contradictions.     You  never 


TOLSTOY  THE  BYZANTINE      in 

know  how  to  get  hold  of  his  real  opinion,  and 
even  when  he  has  a  real  opinion,  it  is  impossi- 
ble to  get  him  to  carry  it  into  practice.  With 
him  it  is  the  unexpected  that  always  happens. 
He  may  be  at  the  same  time  a  Reactionary  and 
a  Progressive,  a  Mystic  and  an  Agnostic,  an 
Imperialist  and  a  Pacifist,  a  Liberal  and  an 
Antisemite. 

To  wander  through  the  Russian  Empire  is 
not  only  to  move  through  vast  distances  of  space 
from  the  ice-bound  plain  in  the  North  to  the 
vine-clad  mills  in  the  South,  it  is  also  to  wan- 
der through  seons  of  time,  it  is  to  travel  down 
the  ages  through  every  stage  of  human  advance. 
Visit  a  Moscow  drawing-room,  and  you  will  lis- 
ten to  the  most  progressive  thought  of  the  twen- 
tieth century,  where  even  the  English  Radicals 
are  discredited  as  old-fashioned.  You  go  to  the 
neighbouring  provincial  town,  and  you  are 
transported  back  to  the  eighteenth  century. 
You  move  to  one  of  the  cities  of  innumerable 
shrines  and  pilgrimages  and  convents,  to  Kieff 
or  Kazan,  and  you  seem  to  be  carried  back  to 
the  Middle  Ages.  You  take  a  voyage  down 
the  Volga,  or  you  ascend  the  mountain  ranges 
of  the  Caucasus,  and  you  leave  civilization  be- 
hind. 


112  GREAT  RUSSIA 


IV 


There  lies  the  explanation  of  the  bewildering 
complexity  of  the  Russian  mind.  The  Russian 
has  a  multiple  personality,  because  he  lives  and 
moves  in  contradictory  worlds.  The  Russian 
Intellectual  lives  in  the  Utopian  future,  while 
his  parents  and  sisters  still  live  in  the  days  of 
serfdom.  He  has  assimilated  the  doctrines  of 
Marx  and  of  Nietzsche,  while  his  rulers  are  still 
carrying  on  the  traditions  of  Peter  the  Great 
and  the  police  are  still  applying  the  methods 
of  Ivan  the  Terrible.  And  the  Russian  Intel- 
lectual must  needs  adapt  himself,  unless  he  is 
prepared  to  leave  the  country  or  to  go  to  prison 
or  to  commit  suicide.  And  having  thus  from 
childhood  learned  to  adapt  himself,  he  de- 
velops a  pliability,  a  suppleness,  and  subtlety 
which  are  becoming  the  main  characteristics  of 
his  type. 

That  versatility  and  power  of  adaptation 
gives  us  the  secret  both  of  the  moral  weak- 
ness and  of  the  intellectual  quality  of  Russian 
culture. 

On  the  one  hand  it  is  obvious  that  this  versa- 
tility must  be  injurious  to  moral  character. 
The  co-existence  of  contradictory  ideals  must 


TOLSTOY  THE  BYZANTINE      113 

produce  indecision  of  purpose.  The  contradic- 
tion between  theory  and  practice,  whilst  it  is 
perfectly  compatable  with  sincerity,  must  be 
destructive  of  will-power,  and  must  be  fatal  to 
political  advance. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  equally  obvious  that 
the  extraordinary  variety  of  intellectual  and 
political  experiences  which  any  educated  Rus- 
sian has  to  go  through  must  produce  a  breadth 
of  sympathy,  a  range  of  intellectual  vision,  a 
tolerant  understanding,  a  receptivity  for  ideas 
which  are  the  charm  of  the  best  Russian  Society. 

Some  years  ago  a  Russian  prince  sent  me  for 
approval  a  religious  tract  which  proved  to  be  a 
masterpiece  of  mystic  lore.  The  writer  had 
been  living  in  a  circle  of  English  Puritans  and 
pietists.  Shortly  after  I  made  his  acquaint- 
ance in  England  his  nomadic  instinct  took  him 
to  Paris.  A  few  months  after  he  had  settled 
in  Paris  he  sent  me  a  literary  composition  of  a 
very  different  nature  from  the  first,  a  Parisian 
love  story,  which  in  its  bold  cynicism  and  per- 
verse wit  reminded  me  of  the  most  realistic 
tales  of  Maupassant.  It  was  a  characteristi- 
cally Russian  incident.  In  an  incredibly  short 
time,  and  with  Slav  thoroughness,  my  friend 
had  adapted  himself  to  the  mystic  surroundings 


114  GREAT  RUSSIA 

of  English  Puritanism,  and  to  the  licence  of  the 
City  of  Pleasure. 


This  seems  to  be  a  devious  and  circuitous  way 
of  approaching  the  character  and  work  of  Tol- 
stoy, but  I  am  sure  it  is  the  only  way  to  reach 
a  deeper  understanding  of  his  personality  and 
of  his  Art.  Most  critics  approach  the  Russian 
giant  in  complete  ignorance  of  the  mental  and 
spiritual  atmosphere  and  climate  in  which  his 
genius  developed.  They  study  his  character 
under  the  strange  impression  that  the  preacher 
of  the  simple  life  was  himself  a  simple  man. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  Tolstoy  never  was  a  sim- 
ple man.  Indeed,  I  do  not  know  in  the  whole 
range  of  European  literature  a  personality  more 
uncannily  complex  and  perplexing.  Two 
years  ago,  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  wrote  a  brief 
and  striking  estimate  of  Tolstoy  for  the  Fabian 
News,  and  it  was  amusing  to  observe  how  the 
great  English  master  of  paradox  was  simply 
bewildered  by  the  paradox  of  Tolstoy's  per- 
sonality. 

Tolstoy's  biography  illustrates  better  than 
any  other  the  distracting  contrasts  of  the  typi- 
cal Russian  nobleman  and  Intellectual.     He 


TOLSTOY  THE  BYZANTINE      115 

saw  from  the  inside  every  phase  of  Russian  life. 
He  lived  in  the  soldiers'  camp  and  in  the  Courts 
of  Royalty,  in  the  drawing-rooms  of  fashion 
and  in  the  haunts  of  Bohemia.  He  lived  the 
savage  life  in  the  Caucasus,  and  the  patriarchal 
life  at  Yasnaya  Polyana.  A  man  of  uncon- 
trollable passions,  he  committed  every  sin  that 
it  was  fashionable  for  a  man  of  his  caste  to 
commit.  He  gambled  away  his  ancestral  home, 
he  joined  the  rebels  of  his  fellow-officers,  and 
wasted  his  substance  in  the  company  of  gipsy 
girls.  Yet  from  an  early  age  he  aspired  to 
sanctity.  Although  professionally  a  soldier,  he 
early  became  an  apostle  of  peace.  A  literary 
lion  in  the  circles  of  Moscow,  he  became  the 
exponent  of  the  simple  life.  An  aristocrat  to 
his  finger-tips,  he  preached  the  gospel  of  de- 
mocracy. A  big  landowner,  he  ended  by  being 
an  advocate  of  the  ideas  of  Henry  George.  A 
Christian  ascetic  and  a  woman-hater,  yet  his 
wife  bore  him  sixteen  children. 

VI 

Even  as  Tolstoy's  surroundings  provide  the  key 
to  his  life  and  character,  they  give  us  an  ex- 
planation of  his  art.  The  one  supreme  and 
original  contribution  of  the  Russian  mind  to 


n6  GREAT  RUSSIA 

world  literature  is  its  power  of  psychological 
analysis,  its  broad  humanity,  its  manysidedness, 
its  understanding  of  every  type  of  human  char- 
acter. Those  qualities  strike  us  equally  in 
Gogol's  "Dead  Souls,"  in  Dostoevsky's  "Crime 
and  Punishment,"  in  Turgenev's  "Sportsmen 
Sketches."  And  those  qualities  reach  their  ma- 
turity and  perfection  in  Tolstoy's  art. 

His  power  of  sympathy  is  unlimited.  He 
understands  the  sinner,  because  he  has  been  a 
sinner.  He  understands  the  saint,  because  he 
has  aspired  to  be  a  saint.  He  understands  the 
savage  and  the  tramp  and  the  peasant,  because 
he  has  lived  with  savages  and  tramps  and  peas- 
ants. He  is  a  stern  moralist,  yet  his  tolerance 
and  charity  are  infinite.  He  holds  strong 
views  on  every  problem  of  life  and  death,  and 
he  expresses  those  views  in  stirring  pamphlets. 
But  when  he  writes  his  stories  and  delineates 
his  characters,  the  teacher  and  preacher  vanish. 
The  artist  remains.  He  describes  the  rake  and 
the  drunkard  with  as  much  sympathy  as  the 
good  man.  Nay,  he  describes  them  more  sym- 
pathetically, for  in  "Anna  Karenina"  the  profli- 
gate Oblonski  and  Anna  the  adulteress  and  the 
drunken  brother  are  more  appealing  than  Levine 
or  Karenine.     Anna  may  break  hearts  around 


TOLSTOY  THE  BYZANTINE      117 

her,  but  she  continues  to  cast  a  spell  over  the 
reader,  even  as  she  fascinates  her  victims. 

There  exists  a  mysterious  Indian  poison,  the 
curare,  once  dear  to  the  vivisectionist,  and  which 
possesses  the  terrible  power  of  dissociating  the 
sensory  nerves  and  the  motor  nerves.  The  sci- 
entist who  curarises  a  dog  can  torture  him  with 
impunity,  for  the  dog  feels  the  pain  but  cannot 
stir  a  muscle  to  express  his  sensations.  I  often 
think  of  this  weird  poison  and  of  the  methods 
of  the  physiologist  when  I  read  the  novels  of 
Tolstoy,  and  when  I  observe  this  complete  sev- 
erance and  dissociation  of  the  artist  and  the 
moralist.  I  think  of  him  as  the  anatomist  of 
the  soul,  who,  unlike  the  professor  of  anatomy 
of  Rembrandt,  is  dissecting  living  bodies  and 
bleeding  hearts,  whilst  all  the  time  he  himself 
remains  unmoved,  serene,  partial,  and  absorbed 
in  his  creations. 

It  is  by  virtue  of  that  artistic  detachment, 
that  absolute  truthfulness  and  sincerity,  as  well 
as  by  virtue  of  this  power  of  universal  sym- 
pathy, it  is  as  the  supreme  anatomist  of  the  soul, 
that  Tolstoy  occupies  his  unique  position  in 
world  literature.  It  is  those  qualities  which 
place  "War  and  Peace"  and  "Anna  Karenina" 
above  any  novels  that  have  ever  been  written. 


CHAPTER  XII 

DOSTOEVSKY  AND  THE  RELI- 
GION OF  HUMAN  SUFFERING 


IT  is  one  of  the  favourite  methods  of  mod- 
ern criticism  which  explains  a  writer's 
work  and  personality  by  his  circumstances 
and  surroundings.  But  there  are  some  literary 
miracles  which  refuse  to  be  explained.  There 
are  some  writers  who  rise  superior  to  circum- 
stances, and  who  challenge  their  surroundings. 
The  subject  of  the  present  chapter  was  pre- 
eminently such  a  writer.  Dostoevsky  seems  to 
have  been  sent  into  the  world  by  a  special 
decree  of  Providence  to  assert  the  supremacy 
of  the  indomitable  human  spirit  over  adverse 
fate.  Small  and  frail  and  haggard  and  miser- 
ably poor,  he  yet  accomplished  prodigies  of  la- 
bour. Diseased  in  mind  and  body,  a  bundle 
of  twitching  nerves,  suffering  from  epilepsy,  he 
yet  preserved  balance  of  judgment  and  sanity 
of  doctrine.  Sentenced  to  death,  and  the  vic- 
tim of  a  monstrous  miscarriage  of  justice,  he 

118 


DOSTOEVSKY  AND  SUFFERING     119 

yet  bore  no  ill-will  against  his  judges,  and  he 
consistently  vindicated  the  cause  of  law  and 
order  against  revolution.  Ill-used  by  his  own 
country,  he  yet  repaid  that  ill-usage  with  the 
most  passionate  tenderness.  A  martyr  who  en- 
dured every  extremity  of  human  suffering,  he 
yet  remained  a  cheerful  and  confirmed  optimist. 
Take  him  all  in  all,  Feodor  Michaelovitch  Dos- 
toevsky,  the  gambler,  the  epileptic,  the  convict, 
stands  out  as  the  most  pathetic  and  most  Christ- 
like figure  in  Russian  letters. 

II 

He  was  born  in  a  Moscow  hospital  in  1821 — 
the  year  of  Napoleon's  death — the  son  of  a  re- 
tired army  doctor.  Belonging  to  the  impov- 
erished nobility  from  whose  ranks  the  Russian 
aristocracy  are  recruited,  he  was  from  his  child- 
hood inured  to  privation.  He  fought  his  way 
through  the  University,  and  he  knew  from  per- 
sonal experience  the  dire  straits  which  he  de- 
scribes in  "Crime  and  Punishment."  At 
twenty-one  years  of  age  he  emerged  as  a  lieu- 
tenant of  engineers,  but  only  to  resign  his  com- 
mission: he  had  already  discovered  his  literary 
vocation.  At  twenty-three  he  wrote  his  first 
novel,  "Poor  Folk,"  which  remains  one  of  his 


120  GREAT  RUSSIA 

best.  In  1849,  on  the  morrow  of  the  Social 
Revolution  which  shook  every  throne  of  Europe, 
when  Russia  was  in  the  clutches  of  the  iron 
despotism  of  Nicholas  I,  he  joined  a  debating 
club  of  political  reformers.  His  adherence 
was  purely  platonic.  He  never  took  part  in 
any  plot,  for  there  never  was  a  less  revolu- 
tionary temperament.  Yet,  through  a  grim 
irony  of  fate,  he  was  implicated  with  thirty-six 
of  his  companions  in  a  charge  of  conspiracy 
and  sentenced  to  death.  He  was  taken  to  the 
place  of  execution  on  a  chill  December  morn- 
ing. Standing  on  a  raised  platform  with 
twenty-one  fellow-prisoners,  stripped  to  his 
shirt,  with  twenty-one  degrees  of  frost,  he  had 
to  listen  for  twenty  minutes  to  the  reading  of 
the  death  sentence,  with  the  soldiers  lined  in 
front  of  him  and  ready  to  shoot.  At  the  last 
moment  he  was  reprieved;  but  that  cruel  scene 
on  that  chill  December  morning  remained  a 
haunting  obsession  and  coloured  his  imagination 
ever  after. 

The  death  sentence  had  been  commuted  into 
four  years  of  hard  labour  in  a  Siberian  con- 
vict station  (described  in  "The  House  of  the 
Dead").     He  spent  three  more  years  in  exile 


DOSTOEVSKY  AND  SUFFERING     121 

and  three  years  as  a  private  soldier,  having  mar- 
ried, in  the  meantime,  the  widow  of  one  of  his 
fellow-prisoners. 

When  he  returned,  in  1859,  after  ten  years, 
his  deliverance  was  but  the  beginning  of  a  new 
life  of  ceaseless  privation  and  suffering.  Un- 
practical, improvident,  generous,  ruined  by 
journalistic  ventures,  in  the  grip  of  epilepsy 
and  of  the  moneylender,  not  a  single  day  was  he 
free  from  harassing  cares,  and  twice  he  had  to 
fly  abroad  to  escape  imprisonment  for  debt. 
When  national  recognition  came  at  last,  when 
his  later  books  had  made  him  the  cynosure  of 
the  younger  generation,  it  was  too  late.  His 
constitution  was  irretrievably  shattered.  He 
died  in  1881,  one  month  before  the  assassination 
of  the  Tsar — a  turning-point  in  Russian  his- 
tory. The  funeral  of  Dostoevsky  was  the  oc- 
casion of  a  demonstration  unique  perhaps  in  the 
history  of  literature.  A  procession  of  a  hun- 
dred thousand  mourners  and  spectators,  princes 
of  the  Imperial  Court,  Cabinet  Ministers,  stu- 
dents, tradesmen,  and  artisans  conducted  to  his 
last  resting-place  the  former  Siberian  convict, 
the  bankrupt  journalist,  the  idol  of  the  Russian 
people. 


122  GREAT  RUSSIA 

III 

It  is  under  such  circumstances  that  Dostoev- 
sky's  novels  were  composed.  An  existence  such 
as  his  would  have  broken  the  spirit  of  a  Ber- 
serker, but  Dostoevsky  (to  use  his  own  expres- 
sion) had  the  "vitality  of  a  cat."  We  admire 
Charles  Lamb,  Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  and 
Sir  Walter  Scott  for  their  gallant  struggle  with 
destiny ;  but  what  are  the  tragic  episodes  in  their 
life's  drama  as  compared  with  the  lifelong  trag- 
edy of  the  Russian  writer? 

Yet,  through  twenty-five  years  of  distress 
and  disease,  his  literary  activity  continued  unre- 
laxed.  One  novel  succeeded  another,  all  of 
them  overloaded  with  human  documents,  some 
of  them  a  thousand  pages  long,  a  thousand 
pages  to  be  slowly  pondered  over  during  the 
interminable  Russian  winter  evenings.  And 
all  those  novels  strike  the  same  keynote  of  hu- 
man misery.  A  martyr  himself,  he  is  the  voice 
of  Russian  martyrs. s  The  mere  titles  of  his 
books— "Poor  Folk,"  "The  Insulted  and  In- 
jured," "The  Idiot,"  "The  Possessed"— reveal 
the  dreary  monotony  of  the  subject  matter! 

Yet  Dostoevsky  had  not  abandoned  hope, 
for  the  depths  of  misery  and  degradation  are 


DOSTOEVSKY  AND  SUFFERING     123 

illumined  by  faith  in  Christ  and  faith  in  hu- 
manity. 

Even  as  his  physical  vitality  resisted  the  on- 
slaught of  poverty  and  imprisonment,  so  did 
his  moral  vitality  resist  the  onslaught  of  scep- 
ticism and  rebellion.  Again  and  again  he  re- 
peated that  his  death  sentence  was  the  greatest 
blessing  of  his  life;  that  it  made  him  what  he 
was,  both  as  a  man  and  as  a  writer.  Dostoev- 
sky,  in  the  book  in  which  he  records  his 
prison  experiences,  "The  House  of  the  Dead," 
has  no  word  of  bitterness  against  those  who 
condemned  him.  It  is  difficult  for  an  Anglo- 
Saxon  to  understand  such  meekness  in  the 
face  of  such  oppression;  but  Dostoevsky  was 
not  an  Anglo-Saxon — he  was  a  Russian  of  the 
Russians.  He  did  not  believe  in  the  West. 
Whereas  Turgenev  and  the  Liberals  held  that 
the  only  salvation  for  Russia  was  by  imitation 
of  European  ideas,  Dostoevsky  believed  that 
Russia  had  a  future  of  her  own,  and  that  this 
future  could  only  be  reached  by  following  her 
own  traditions.  He  was  convinced  that  it  was 
the  shipwrecked  and  the  oppressed,  it  was  the 
convict  and  the  tramp,  who  alone  possessed  the 
secret  of  Divine  wisdom.  It  was  the  meek  and 
the  humble  who  were  to  inherit  the  earth. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

THOUGHTS  ON  THE  RUSSIAN 
LANGUAGE 


IT  is  difficult  to  interest  the  educated  Eng- 
lishman in  a  subject  so  widely  remote  from 
his  intellectual  horizon  as  the  study  of  the 
Russian  language ;  and  even  the  Oxford  classical 
scholar,  who,  it  is  true,  is  prodigiously  igno- 
rant outside  the  narrow  range  of  his  professional 
studies,  knows  nearly  as  much  about  the  dia- 
lects of  the  Bantu  tribes  of  Central  Africa,  as 
about  the  language  of  Tolstoy.  This  dense  ig- 
norance and  stupid  insularity  cannot  continue 
for  ever.  Already  the  University  of  Liverpool, 
under  the  able  leadership  of  Professor  Pares, 
has  done  splendid  work  in  promoting  intellec- 
tual intercourse  between  Great  Britain  and 
Russia.  Under  the  stimulus  of  the  modern 
universities — more  progressive  than  the  older 
seats  of  learning — the  coming  generation  will, 
sooner  or  later,  awaken  to  the  existence  of  a  lan- 
guage which  provides  as  valuable  a  mental  dis- 
cipline and  gymnastic  as  any  classical  language, 

124 


THE  RUSSIAN  LANGUAGE      125 

which  possesses  almost  as  creative  and  as  orig- 
inal a  literature  as  the  Greek,  and  a  much  richer 
one  than  the  Latin,  and  which  has  this  further 
claim  on  our  attention  that  it  is  the  language 
of  an  imperial  people  which  will  sooner  or  later 
dominate  the  political  world.  Already  Russian 
is  the  dominant  language  of  175,000,000  peo- 
ple. In  ten  years  it  will  be  spoken  by  200,- 
000,000  people.  In  1950  it  will  be  spoken  by 
300,000,000.  Nor  must  we  forget  the  impor- 
tant fact  that  Russian  is  the  key  to  a  dozen 
other  Slavonic  languages,  and  especially  that  it 
is  closely  allied  to  the  Bulgarian  language,  and 
to  the  Serbian  language,  which  itself  is  destined 
to  become  one  day  the  language  of  an  imperial 
federation,  extending  from  Dalmatia  and  Croa- 
tia in  the  West  to  the  Iron  Gates  in  the  North 
and  Salonica  in  the  South. 

Finally,  it  has  to  be  kept  in  mind  that 
Slavonic  or  ecclesiastical  Russian  is  the  common 
sacred  language  of  all  the  Greek  Orthodox  Slav 
nations. 

II 

The  Russian  language  is  one  of  the  most  an- 
cient of  European  languages.  The  structure 
and  morphology  of  its  grammar,  as  well  as  its 


126  GREAT  RUSSIA 

vocabulary,  bring  us  nearer  than  any  other  liv- 
ing tongue  to  the  older  Indo-European  tongues, 
Sanscrit  and  Lithuanian.  Yet,  in  another 
sense,  Russian  may  also  be  said  to  be  one  of  the 
most  recent  of  modern  languages.  It  is  true 
that  as  a  spoken  language  and  as  the  language 
of  poetry  it  has  produced  from  the  early  Mid- 
dle Ages  an  inexhaustible  literature  of  epic  and 
song.  But  as  a  written  and  literary  language, 
as  a  vehicle  of  prose,  the  Russian  tongue  is  al- 
most of  yesterday.  I  have  always  firmly  be- 
lieved that  linguistic  development  is  not  an 
evolutionary,  unconscious  process,  but  a  con- 
scious activity,  that  it  is  not  natural  but  arti- 
ficial because  artistic.  The  history  of  Russian 
as  a  literary  language  fully  confirms  my  theory. 
It  might  almost  be  contended  that  as  a  literary 
medium  it  has  not  grown,  but  has  been  made, 
and  that  even  as  the  Russian  State  itself,  the 
Russian  language  has  been  built  up  deliberately 
by  philologists  and  academicians,  and  that  its 
grammatical  laws  have  been  codified  almost  as 
autocratically  as  its  political  laws,  although  less 
arbitrarily.  It  is  strange  that  reforming  Rus- 
sian despots  like  Peter,  and  Catherine  the  Great, 
although  German  princes  by  origin,  should  have 
realized   the  importance  of  the  Russian  Ian- 


THE  RUSSIAN  LANGUAGE      127 

guage  as  a  great  moral  and  political  force,  and 
that  they  should  have  encouraged  its  study  at 
a  time  when  even  German  rulers,  like  Freder- 
ick the  Great,  professed  nothing  but  contempt 
for  their  national  German  tongue.  In  one  sense 
it  may  be  said  that  some  of  those  foreign  rulers 
had  a  clearer  consciousness  of  the  magnificent 
future  which  lay  before  the  Russian  language 
than  even  the  Russian  aristocracy.  For  the 
Russian  aristocracy  continued  to  sacrifice  native 
culture  to  French  culture.  While  they  them- 
selves spoke  the  language  of  Voltaire,  they  left 
the  native  tongue  to  the  Muzhik.  Readers  of 
Tolstoy's  "War  and  Peace"  will  remember 
how,  in  the  salons  of  Moscow,  the  Muscovite 
magnates  would  use  the  French  language  even 
when  cursing  their  French  invaders,  and  how 
they  would  submit  to  the  manners  of  Na- 
poleonic France  in  the  very  act  of  repelling  her 
political  influence. 

Keeping  these  historical  facts  in  mind,  it 
may,  therefore,  be  asserted  that  Russian  as  a 
modern  vehicle  of  national  culture  is  barely 
one  century  old.  The  publication  of  the  great 
"History  of  Karamzin"  may  be  taken  as  mark- 
ing the  beginning  of  the  linguistic  and  literary 
consciousness  of  the  Russian  people.     It  is  all 


128  GREAT  RUSSIA 

the  more  necessary  to  impress  this  fact  upon 
our  minds,  if  we  want  duly  to  appreciate  the 
marvellous  results  which  the  Russian  language 
has  achieved  in  so  incredibly  short  a  time. 

Ill 

Having  existed  for  ages  mainly  as  an  oral 
language,  as  the  language  of  song  and  romance, 
and  continuing  a  precarious  and  humble  ex- 
istence as  the  voice  of  the  down-trodden  and 
inarticulate  serf,  the  Russian  language  would 
probably  have  been  broken  up  into  dialects  in- 
numerable, and  the  Russian  nationality  itself 
would  have  been  submerged  in  the  nationality 
of  its  hereditary  enemies,  the  Poles,  if  the  an- 
cient speech  had  not  been  preserved  in  its  essen- 
tial forms  in  the  language  of  the  Church  and  the 
translation  of  the  Bible.  Church  Slavonic  has 
done  for  the  Russian  people  what  the  transla- 
tion of  Ulfilas  did  for  the  Goths,  what  Luther's 
Bible  has  done  for  the  Germans,  what  the  Au- 
thorized Version  has  done  for  the  English.  It 
has  supplied  an  ideal  standard  of  speech,  a  testo 
de  lingua,  which  makes  the  study  of  Slavonic 
indispensable  for  literary  as  well  as  for  political 
purposes.  But  Slavonic  has  done  a  great  deal 
more  for  the  Russian  people;  it  has  welded  to- 


THE  RUSSIAN  LANGUAGE      129 

gether  not  only  the  Russian  nation  but  the  or- 
thodox Slav  peoples.  It  is,  therefore,  not  too 
much  to  say  that  the  translation  of  St.  Cyril 
and  St.  Methodius  and  the  apostolate  of  the 
two  Slav  brothers,  has  been  one  of  the  half- 
dozen  decisive  events  of  the  history  of  the  mod- 
ern world,  as  decisive  as  the  conquest  of  Gaul 
by  Julius  Csesar  or  as  the  Empire  of  Charle- 
magne. For  it  is  mainly  through  the  creation 
of  ecclesiastical  Slavonic  that  the  southern 
Slavs  have  been  drawn  into  and  maintained  in 
the  orbit  of  Great  Russia,  and  it  is  as  the  result 
of  the  achievement  of  St.  Cyril  and  St.  Me- 
thodius that  the  Mosque  of  St.  Sophia  will  be 
in  future  ages  the  metropolitan  cathedral  of  all 
the  orthodox  Slavs  of  Eastern  Christendom. 

IV 

It  is  deeply  to  be  regretted  that  the  academi- 
cians and  philologists  who,  at  the  beginning  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  had  to  fix  the  standard 
of  the  Russian  language,  and  who  had  to  per- 
form the  difficult  task  of  cutting  straight  roads 
through  the  dense  forest  of  the  old  Russian  lan- 
guage, should  not  have  cut  down  some  of  the 
rank  undergrowth  of  the  Russian  grammar, 
and  that  they  should  not  have  taken  their  cue 


130  GREAT  RUSSIA 

from  their  French  teachers,  those  great  masters 
of  logic  and  simplicity.  Unfortunately,  even 
after  the  reforming  labours  of  eighteenth-cen- 
tury grammarians,  like  Lomonosov,  that  giant 
among  Russian  pioneers,  the  Russian  language 
remains  the  most  complex  of  European  lan- 
guages, and  the  accentuation  of  its  nouns  and 
the  flexions  and  aspects  of  its  verbs  are  the 
despair  of  the  bewildered  student.  It  is  also 
unfortunate  that,  largely  under  the  influence  of 
bad  German  novels,  the  Russian  writers  should 
favour  the  ponderous  periodical  style,  and  that 
they  too  frequently  express  in  an  involved 
participial  clause  what  a  French  writer  would 
express  in  a  noun  clause.  I  firmly  believe  that 
Russian  writers  would  enormously  improve  if 
in  ninety  cases  out  of  a  hundred  they  followed 
the  French  analytical  way  rather  than  the  syn- 
thetical German  way.  At  the  same  time  it 
must  be  admitted  that  even  though  many  of  the 
grammatical  forms  are  an  emb arras  de  riches ses 
and  might  be  sacrificed  to  advantage,  the  major- 
ity contribute  to  the  substantial  wealth  of  the 
Russian  speech,  and  enable  it  to  express  the 
subtlest  shades  of  meaning,  and  to  range  over 
the  whole  gamut  of  human  emotion.  One 
preposition  or  prefix  like  po  or  za  will  enable 


THE  RUSSIAN  LANGUAGE      131 

the  Russian  to  express  the  beginning  or  the  con- 
tinuation or  the  repetition  of  action.  A  few 
suffixes  will  enable  the  Russian  to  give  free 
expression  to  every  contradictory  feeling. 
Whereas  the  English  language — probably  alone 
among  European  tongues — has  sacrificed  such 
means  of  expression  as  diminutives  and  aug- 
mentatives,  the  Russian  language  has  treasured 
and  multiplied  this  invaluable  means  of  emo- 
tional expression,  and  is  able  to  express  merely 
by  a  slight  modification  in  the  ending  of  a  word, 
every  degree  of  affection  and  hatred,  of  famil- 
iarity or  contempt. 

To  the  uneducated  there  may  be  little  differ- 
ence between  "ancient  mariner"  and  "old 
sailor" ;  but  for  literary  purposes  there  is  a  gulf 
between  the  Anglo-Saxon  and  the  French-Nor- 
man words.  Even  so,  to  the  uninitiated,  the 
niceties  of  Russian  grammar  may  be  only  a 
game  of  pedants,  but  to  the  artist  that  game  of 
pedants  gives  full  scope  to  all  the  resources  of 
the  literary  craft;  and,  therefore,  only  the  lit- 
erary craftsman  can  appreciate  all  the  possibili- 
ties of  that  wonderful  instrument,  the  Russian 
language,  and  only  he  can  realize  its  tremendous 
difficulty.  I  remember  Maxim  Gorky  telling 
me  once  that,  in  his  opinion,  there  were  only 


132  GREAT  RUSSIA 

three  men  in  the  whole  history  of  Russian  lit- 
erature who  had  perfect  control  of  their  instru- 
ment, namely,  Pushkin,  Turgenev,  and  Chek- 
hov. Of  Turgenev  it  is  certainly  true  to  say 
that  he  is  the  one  supreme  master  of  prose 
whom  Russian  literature  has  produced.  His 
intense  appreciation  of  and  his  intimate  famil- 
iarity with  the  French  language  only  made  him 
more  keenly  conscious  of  the  superior  beauty 
and  of  the  wider  possibilities  of  his  native 
tongue.  He  admired  it  and  loved  it,  as  only  a 
great  artist  could  love  the  vehicle  of  his  art. 
During  the  reign  of  Nicholas  I,  in  the  darkest 
hour  of  Russian  reaction,  when  bureaucratic 
corruption,  military  despotism,  and  ecclesiastic 
obscurantism  were  supreme,  one  thought  alone 
kept  awake  the  faith  of  Turgenev  in  the  future 
of  the  race.  He  only  retained  his  belief  for  the 
apparently  irrelevant  reason  that  a  race  which 
had  proved  capable  of  creating  such  a  wonder- 
ful language  as  Russian  must  indeed  be  called 
to  a  glorious  destiny. 

V 

Still  with  all  our  admiration  for  the  Russian 
tongue,  the  question  forces  itself  upon  us:  Is 
not  the  very  existence  of  this  wonderful  Ian- 


THE  RUSSIAN  LANGUAGE      133 

guage  an  obstacle  in  the  path  of  civilization"? 
Will  it  not  for  ever  prevent  Western  culture 
from  gaining  access  to  the  Empire  of  the  Tsars'? 
Will  it  not  for  ever  keep  Russia  isolated  from 
Europe*?  It  is  strange  that  while  Nature  has 
established  no  physical  barrier  between  Eastern 
and  Western  Europe,  and  has  made  one  un- 
broken plain  extending  for  thousands  of  miles, 
men  should  have  erected  this  formidable  intel- 
lectual  barrier  of  language  between  the  Latin,  * 
the  Teuton,  and^  the  Slav. 


But  whether  the  existence  of  this  formidable 
linguistic  barrier  is  a  blessing  or  a  curse,  whether 
we  have  cause  to  regret  that,  merely  through  the 
existence  of  the  Russian  language  Russia  can 
never  be  assimilated  to  Europe,  or  whether  we 
have  cause  to  rejoice  that  the  existence  of  so 
difficult  a  language  should  maintain  inviolate 
the  originality  and  independence  of  the  Rus- 
sian people,  one  fact  is  certain,  that  the  lin- 
guistic obstacle  will  be  greater  in  the  future 
than  in  the  past.  And  the  sooner  we  realize 
this  and  the  consequences  which  it  entails,  the 
better  it  will  be  for  the  mutual  relationship  of 
European  powers. 

If  the  Latin,  the  Anglo-Saxon,  and  the  Teu- 
ton are  to  be  brought  into  close  communion 


134  GREAT  RUSSIA 

with  the  Slav,  they  will  have  to  make  this  ef- 
fort to  meet  him  on  his  own  linguistic  ground. 
Hitherto,  the  educated  Russian  has  taken  the 
trouble  to  learn  the  European  languages,  but  the 
time  is  coming  when  the  European  will  be  ex- 
pected by  the  Russian  to  learn  the  Russian 
tongue.  As  Russian  patriotism  becomes  more 
self-conscious  and,  therefore,  more  sensitive,  as 
Russian  culture  becomes  more  self-supporting, 
there  will  be  a  complete  change  in  the  relative 
position  of  the  languages  of  the  world.  For 
instance,  the  Russian,  who  neither  loves  nor  ad- 
mires the  Teuton,  must  necessarily  ask  himself 
why  he,  possessing  a  more  original  and  a  more 
humane  culture  than  that  of  the  Teuton,  should 
go  out  of  his  way  to  learn  German  and  why  he 
should  not  expect  and  compel  the  German  to 
learn  Russian ! 

And  from  his  own  point  of  view  the  Russian 
is  quite  right.  There  is  no  answer  to  his  ob- 
jections, and  there  is  only  one  way  out  of  the 
difficulty.  If  the  coming  generation  wants  to 
derive  the  fullest  advantage  of  intellectual  and 
moral  intercourse  with  what  promises  to  be  the 
most  original  culture  which  the  world  has  seen 
since  the  Renaissance,  Europe  will  have  to  make 
the  study  of  Russian  a  compulsory  branch  of  the 


THE  RUSSIAN  LANGUAGE      135 

humanities.  Pedants  continue  to  wrangle 
whether  they  should  preserve  Latin  or  Greek 
or  both  in  the  education  of  the  young.  I  am 
convinced  that  the  near  future  will  force  upon 
us  an  unexpected  solution  of  the  "Battle  of 
Tongues."  Although  to  the  pedagogue  of  to- 
day it  may  appear  as  the  wildest  of  visions,  I 
confidently  prophesy  that  before  the  schoolboy 
of  to-day  will  have  attained  to  mature  age,  the 
study  of  Russian  will  take  the  place  of  Greek 
in  the  schools  of  Europe ;  the  study  of  Vladimir 
Soloviov  *  will  take  the  place  of  his  master 
Plato;  Karamzin  and  Pushkin  will  replace 
Livy  and  Virgil.  Before  the  first  half  of  the 
century  has  run  its  course,  Slav  culture  will  at 
last  come  into  its  inheritance,  and  will  take  its 
revenge  for  the  unjust  neglect  of  the  West. 

*  A  complete  English  version  of  "War,  Progress  and  the 
End  of  History,"  Soloviov's  best  known  work,  has  just  been 
published  by  Alfred  A.  Knopf. 


PART  IV 
Russian  Problems 


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE  RESURRECTION  OF 
POLAND 

I 

THE  English  traveller  on  his  way  from 
London  to  Odessa,  after  crossing  the 
dreary  march  of  Brandenburg,  reaches 
a  vast  and  monotonous  plain  where  three  Em- 
pires meet,  where  Prussia  ends,  where  Russia 
and  Austria  begin,  a  region  inhabited  by  one  of 
the  most  gifted  races  of  Europe,  whose  suffer- 
ings are  one  of  the  tragedies  of  history,  and 
whose  future  is  one  of  the  perplexing  enigmas 
of  international  politics.  That  vast  plain,  of 
which  no  hill  relieves  the  melancholy  uniform- 
ity, is  the  once  mighty  Kingdom  of  Poland. 
It  is  true  that  neither  the  name  of  the  country 
nor  that  of  the  people  appears  on  any  map  of 
Europe,  but  then  it  is  often  the  most  important 
maps  that  are  ignored  by  the  cartographer.  In 
this  case  it  must  be  confessed  in  extenuation  of 
the  cartographer's  omission  that  the  boundaries 
of  that  Kingdom  of  Poland  are  arbitrary  and 
indefinite.  Few  geographers  will  agree  as  to 
139 


140  GREAT  RUSSIA 

the  exact  area  occupied  by  the  Polish  race. 
But  we  shall  not  be  far  wrong  if  we  estimate 
the  total  number  of  Polish-speaking  people  at 
twenty  millions,  of  whom  four  millions  belong 
to  Austria,  and  four  millions  and  twelve  mil- 
lions respectively  are  unwilling  subjects  of  the 
Kaiser  and  of  the  Tsar.  And  that  number  is 
increasing,  for  amongst  many  uncertainties  one 
fact  is  certain,  that  in  the  wide  expanse  where 
the  Pole  and  the  Teuton  are  confronted,  it  is 
the  Teuton  who  is  losing  ground,  and  it  is  the 
Pole  who  is  gaining. 

II 

Perhaps  the  simplest  way  to  explain  the 
unique  position  of  Poland  to  a  British  reader  is 
to  describe  her  as  the  Ireland  of  Central  Eu- 
rope, with  this  difference,  that  whereas  Ireland 
has  long  ago  been  delivered  from  the  despotism 
of  the  Conqueror,  Poland  is  still  in  the  grip  of 
her  oppressors.  Otherwise  the  annals  of  Po- 
land are  very  much  a  repetition  of  the  tragic 
annals  of  Ireland,  and  both  countries  make  a 
similar  appeal  to  the  student  of  history,  of  eth- 
ics, and  of  politics. 

In  the  first  place,  we  ought  to  be  interested 
in  Poland  on  historical  grounds.     Poland  can 


RESURRECTION  OF  POLAND     141 

boast  of  a  heroic  past.  On  more  than  one  oc- 
casion Poland  saved  Europe  from  the  invasion 
of  Turk  and  Tartar,  and  although  the  Poles  are 
branded  to-day  by  the  Prussians  as  an  inferior 
race,  predestined  to  slavery,  the  truth  is  that 
Poland  was  a  highly  civilized  country  when  the 
Prussians  and  the  Russians  were  only  hordes  of 
barbarians. 

In  the  second  place,  we  ought  to  be  interested 
in  Poland  on  moral  grounds,  for  the  Poles  have 
been,  and  still  are,  the  victims  of  an  odious 
persecution,  which  must  rouse  the  indignation 
of  all  those  who  believe  in  justice,  and  who  be- 
lieve in  freedom. 

In  the  third  place,  we  ought  to  be  interested 
in  Poland  on  practical  grounds,  because  the 
question  of  Poland  remains  a  burning  question. 
Poland  remains  an  open  sore.  The  map  of 
Europe  will  be  recast  by  the  future  Congress, 
on  the  principle  that  each  nation  has  the  right 
to  decide  its  own  destinies.  It  is  quite  safe  to 
prophesy  on  the  basis  of  that  principle  of 
nationalities,  that  a  not  distant  future  will  see 
the  resurrection  of  the  ancient  Kingdom  of  Po- 
land.* 

♦This  was  written  in  the  Spring  of  1913.  In  the  Sum- 
mer of  the  succeeding  year  the  Grand  Duke  Nicholas  an- 
nounced  the   fulfilment   of   my  prophecy   in   the  following 


V 


142  GREAT  RUSSIA 

III 

The  "partition"  of  Poland,  the  murder  of  a 
great  civilized  people,  is  one  of  the  most  revolt- 
ing political  crimes  of  modern  times.  Of  this 
crime,  Frederic,  called  "the  Great,"  was  the  in- 

proclamation.  The  proclamation  is  a  striking  and  illumina- 
tive commentary  on  some  of  the  opinions  expressed  in  this 
chapter. 

PROCLAMATION 
-  "Poles! 

"The  hour  has  struck  in  which  the  sacred  dream  of  your 
fathers  and  forefathers  may  find  fulfilment. 

"A  century  and  a  half  ago,  the  living  flesh  of  Poland  was 
torn  asunder,  but  her  soul  did  not  die.  She  lived  in  hope 
that  there  would  come  an  hour  for  the  resurrection  of  the 
Polish  nation  and  for  sisterly  reconciliation  with  Russia. 

"The  Russian  Army  now  brings  you  the  joyful  tidings  of 
this  reconciliation.  May  the  boundaries  be  annulled  which 
cut  the  Polish  nation  to  pieces!  May  that  nation  re-unite 
unto  one  body  under  the  sceptre  of  the  Russian  Emperor. 
Under  this  sceptre  Poland  shall  be  re-born,  free  in  faith,  in 
language,  in  self-government. 

"One  thing  only  Russia  expects  of  you:  equal  considera- 
tion for  the  rights  of  those  nationalities  to  which  history 
has  linked  you. 

"With  open  heart,  with  hand  fraternally  outstretched, 
Russia  steps  forward  to  meet  you.  She  believes  that  the 
sword  has  not  rusted  which,  at  Griinwald,  struck  down  the 
enemy.  From  the  shores  of  the  Pacific  to  the  North  Seas, 
the  Russian  armies  are  on  the  march.  The  dawn  of  a  new 
life  is  breaking  for  you. 

"May  there  shine,  resplendent  above  that  dawn,  the  sign 
of  the  Cross,  symbol  of  the  Passion  and  Resurrection  of 
Nation ! 

(Signed.)     "Commander-in-Chief    General    Adjutant. 

"NICHOLAS." 

i   (14)  August,  1914 


RESURRECTION  OF  POLAND     143 

stigator,  and  he  secured  impunity  for  his  crime 
by  obtaining  the  complicity  of  Russia  and  Aus- 
tria, of  Maria  Theresa  and  Catherine  "the 
Great."  To  use  the  cynical  phrase  of  Frederic, 
"the  three  Sovereigns  partook  of  the  Eucharistic 
body  of  Poland."  The  three  murderers  of  the 
Polish  nation  have  tried  to  justify  themselves, 
and  they  have  justified  themselves  by  slander- 
ing the  Poles.  Even  thus,  in  Imperial  Rome, 
the  public  executioner  dishonoured  his  victim 
before  execution.  We  are  told  that  the  Poles 
fully  deserved  their  fate.  We  are  told  that 
they  were  a  prey  to  the  Jesuits,  or  that  they 
were  a  prey  to  anarchy,  or  that  they  were  a 
prey  to  an  unruly  aristocracy.  We  have  been 
long  familiar  in  the  past  with  similar  arguments 
on  the  Irish  Question,  and  in  both  controversies 
the  arguments  have  about  equal  value.  It  is 
quite  true  that  Poland  was  a  prey  to  anarchy, 
but  that  anarchy  was  largely  caused  by  the  in- 
trigues of  her  mighty  neighbours.  It  is  quite 
true  that  after  playing  an  important  part  in 
European  culture,  after  resisting  the  Tartar  and 
the  Turk,  the  Polish  aristocracy  oppressed  the 
people  whom  they  had  originally  saved.  But, 
alas!  the  oppression  of  the  people  by  a  tyran- 
nical aristocracy  is  not  a  phenomenon  peculiar 


144  GREAT  RUSSIA 

to  Poland,  and  it  was  more  apparent  in  Poland 
simply  because  of  the  total  absence  of  any  Mid- 
dle Class,  owing  to  the  poverty  of  the  country, 
and  owing  to  the  insecurity  of  war.  It  is  only 
in  our  own  generation  that  we  have  witnessed 
in  Poland  the  gradual  emergence  of  a  Middle 
Class.  Even  to-day  trade  and  industry  are 
largely  in  the  hands  of  the  Jews,  to  whom,  for 
historical  reasons,  Poland  has  become  a  country 
of  refuge,  and  a  second  Palestine.  About  five 
million  Jews  are  living  within  the  limits  of  the 
old  Kingdom. 

In  any  case,  those  accusations  against  Polish 
anarchy,  against  the  unruly  Polish  aristocracy, 
were  only  a  thinly  veiled  pretence  on  the  part 
of  the  conquerors  to  excuse  their  crime.  Those 
excuses  were  merely  used  to  deceive  public  opin- 
ion. In  his  moments  of  cynical  outspokenness, 
Frederic,  yclept  "the  Great,"  never  concealed 
his  real  motive  for  the  annexation  of  Poland, 
which  was  the  same  as  his  motive  for  the  annex- 
ation of  Silesia,  namely,  self-aggrandisement 
and  the  lust  of  territory. 

IV 

It  is,  then,  under  such  flimsy  pretences,  which 
added  insult  to  violence,  that  Poland  was  di- 


RESURRECTION  OF  POLAND     145 

vided  amongst  the  three  Empires  of  Central 
Europe,  and  that  Poland  was  deleted  from  the 
map  of  Europe.  This  is  not  the  place  to  recall 
the  tragic  history  of  the  nation  since  the  Parti- 
tion. In  Austria  the  Poles  rose  and  failed,  they 
rose  again  and  succeeded,  and  were  granted 
autonomy.  In  Prussia  the  Poles  were  too  weak, 
and  the  army  of  the  Hohenzollern  too  strong  to 
give  any  chance  to  the  rebels;  they  had,  there- 
fore, to  be  content  with  opposing  a  passive  and 
sullen  resistance  to  unjust  laws.  But  most 
poignant  of  all  was  the  national  tragedy  in 
Russia.  The  Poles  rose  in  1830,  they  rose 
again  in  1863,  and  once  more  they  rose  in  1905. 
Each  time  they  were  unsuccessful.  After  each 
revolution,  they  have  been  governed  with  more 
ruthless  severity.  Oppression,  rebellion,  and 
repression  have  been  the  three  recurrent  phases 
in  the  monotonous  drama  of  Russian  Poland. 

To  a  superficial  observer,  the  story  of  the 
Polish  nation  may  appear  to  be,  on  the  whole, 
a  history  of  national  failure,  but  as  in  Ireland, 
so  in  Poland,  the  people  have  really  triumphed. 
For  their  spirit  has  never  been  broken.  The 
strength  of  the  three  great  military  powers  has 
not  been  equal  to  the  indomitable  resistance  of 
a  poverty-stricken,  disarmed,  dismembered  race. 


146  GREAT  RUSSIA 

The  Polish  people  were  determined  to  live,  and 
as  a  result  they  are  stronger  to-day  than  they 
were  a  hundred  years  ago.  Poland  is  to-day 
more  than  a  dream,  more  than  a  pious  aspira- 
tion. Unless  patriotism  is  only  an  illusion, 
unless  nationality  is  only  based  on  political 
force,  and  is  to  be  measured  only  by  commercial 
success,  the  Polish  nationality  is  an  accom- 
plished fact,  for  the  Polish  people  are  united 
by  the  strongest  bonds  which  can  unite  any  peo- 
ple: a  common  language,  a  common  religion, 
common  traditions,  the  memory  of  common  suf- 
ferings, and  an  unshakable  faith  in  a  common 
Destiny 


Of  the  three  component  parts  of  Poland,  the 
Austrian  part,  Galicia  need  not  detain  us,  al- 
though to  the  ordinary  traveller  it  is  far  more 
interesting  that  the  two  other  parts.  Its  capi- 
tal, Cracow,  the  Polish  Rome,  is  one  of  the  his- 
torical cities  of  the  world.  Austrian  Poland 
possesses  in  the  Carpathian  Mountains  some  of 
the  finest  scenery  in  Central  Europe.  Its  Al- 
pine resorts  attract  an  ever-increasing  number 
of  tourists,  and  Zakopane  is,  in  summer,  a  bril- 
liant and  fascinating  Kurort,  and  the  gathering 


RESURRECTION  OF  POLAND     147 

place  of  Polish  patriots  from  the  three  Empires. 
But  to  the  student  of  politics,  Austrian  Poland 
appeals  much  less  than  Prussian  or  Russian  Po- 
land, except  in  so  far  as  it  shows  the  political 
capacity  of  the  people.  After  being  the  most 
disloyal,  Galicia  has  become  one  of  the  most 
loyal  provinces  of  the  Austrian  Empire.  The 
influence  of  the  Austrian  Poles  in  politics  is 
shown  not  on  the  side  of  anarchy,  but  on  the  side 
of  conciliation  and  moderation.  The  result  of 
such  Polish  autonomy  as  has  been  granted  to 
Galicia  is  the  best  answer  to  those  that  main- 
tain that  the  Poles  are  incapable  of  self-gov- 
ernment. 

VI 

If  Austrian  Poland  is  the  least  important,  Rus- 
sian Poland  is  the  most  important  of  the  three 
branches  of  the  Polish  family.  It  is  also  the 
most  homogeneous.  There  are  some  two  hun- 
dred thousand  Germans,  three  hundred  and 
fifty  thousand  Russian  soldiers  and  officials, 
and  three  million  Jews,  who  are  the  proletariate 
of  Israel.  But  the  bulk  of  a  population  of  over 
twelve  millions  are  Poles,  and  their  numbers 
are  rapidly  increasing  with  the  industrial  ex- 
pansion and  the  prosperity  of  the  country,  for, 


148  GREAT  RUSSIA 

as  Prince  von  Biilow,  the  German  Chancellor, 
graciously  put  it,  the  Poles  breed  like  rabbits. 
He  might,  perhaps,  have  added  that  they  have 
often  been  shot  like  rabbits.  Russian  Poland, 
with  the  ancient  capital  of  the  Kingdom,  War- 
saw (population,  850,000),  is  one  of  the  busiest 
centres  of  the  Russian  Empire.  But  this  ex- 
traordinary industrial  and  commercial  expan- 
sion has  brought  neither  contentment  nor  real 
prosperity  to  the  people.  Not  only  has  Rus- 
sian Poland  more  than  her  share  of  the  indus- 
trial unrest,  prevalent  all  over  Europe,  but  that 
industrial  unrest  is  complicated  by  constant  po- 
litical and  religious  troubles,  by  the  conflict  be- 
tween conquerors  and  conquered,  between  Greek 
Orthodox  and  Uniats  and  Roman  Catholic. 
Warsaw,  once  the  gayest  of  cities,  is  now  one 
of  the  saddest.  Occupied  by  a  Russian  army 
corps,  she  gives  the  impression  of  a  beleaguered 
city.  Any  autonomous  political  life,  or  even 
any  free  expression  of  political  opinion,  are 
paralyzed.  The  writer  of  these  lines  was  in- 
vited not  long  ago  by  a  group  of  leading  Lib- 
erals in  Warsaw  to  give  a  lecture  describing 
his  impressions  of  the  country.  He  accepted 
the  invitation,  but  was  given  to  understand  that 
it  would  be  safer  for  him  not  to  deliver  his  ad- 


RESURRECTION  OF  POLAND     149 

dress,  and  subsequent  events  clearly  proved  that 
it  was  better  to  err  on  the  side  of  caution. 

As  there  is  little  political  life,  so  there  is  lit- 
tle intercourse  between  the  different  sections  of 
the  people.  The  Jew  does  not  mix  with  the 
Christian,  nor  the  Pole  with  the  Russian.  So- 
cial life  is  at  its  lowest  ebb.  The  police  is 
everywhere  visible,  and  the  Polish  population 
lives  in  an  atmosphere  of  suspicion  and  sup- 
pression. 

VII 

It  seems  inconceivable  that  national  antipathy 
could  go  any  further  than  the  antipathy  which 
existed  between  Russian  and  Pole  before  the 
present  war  of  liberation.  Yet  Prussia  has  suc- 
ceeded in  inspiring  her  Polish  subjects  with  a 
hatred  even  more  deadly.  And  this  is  not  be- 
cause Poles  and  Russians  belong  to  the  same 
Slav  race,  whilst  Poles  and  Prussians  belong  to 
different  races.  The  Pole  hates  the  Prussian, 
because  there  is  in  Prussian  despotism  some- 
thing much  more  odious  than  in  Russian  despot- 
ism. The  Russian  was  content  in  the  past  to 
persecute  the  Pole.  But  the  Prussian  both  per- 
secutes him,  despises  him,  and  slanders  him. 
The  Russian  at  least  did  not  use  any  canting 


150  GREAT  RUSSIA 

phrases.  He  oppressed  the  Pole,  merely  De- 
cause  the  Russian  was  the  stronger.  The  Prus- 
sian oppresses  the  Pole,  and  calls  it  civilizing 
him.  He  brands  him  as  being  of  an  inferior 
stamp.  German  Liberals  for  two  generations 
have  denounced  the  imperial  policy  of  expro- 
priation and  Germanization.  But  it  is  getting 
worse.  The  Pole  is  not  allowed  to  hold  pub- 
lic meetings,  or  to  wear  his  national  colours. 
The  Polish  child  is  not  allowed  to  pray  in  its 
mother-tongue,  because  German  culture,  for- 
sooth, in  virtue  of  its  superiority  must  stamp 
out  Polish  culture.  The  Polish  peasant  is  not 
allowed  to  possess  the  land  of  his  fathers,  and 
whereas  the  Russian  bureaucracy  in  the  days  of 
Milioutine  has  distributed  millions  of  acres  to 
Polish  peasants,  the  Prussian  bureaucracy  have 
already  spent  hundreds  of  millions  of  marks  to 
expropriate  them. 

VIII 

Limitation  of  space  prevents  me  from  dis- 
cussing the  Prussian  theory.  Nor  is  it  worth 
discussing.  The  whole  pedantic  contention  can 
be  disproved  by  the  summary  verdict  of  history, 
and  disposed  of  in  the  following  single  state- 
ment of  fact:     Surely  a  race  which  in  modern 


RESURRECTION  OF  POLAND     151 

times  has  produced  a  thinker  like  Copernic,  a 
hero  like  Sobieski,  a  musician  like  Chopin,  a 
poet  like  Mickiewicz,  a  physicist  like  Madame 
Curie,  a  race  which  still  can  boast  of  the  most 
beautiful,  the  most  witty  women  of  Central 
Europe,  cannot  be  said  to  be  so  incurably  in- 
ferior to  the  heavy-booted,  sword-rattling  Prus- 
sian, nor  will  such  a  race  be  subjected  much 
longer  to  brutal  persecution. 


CHAPTER  XV 

THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE 
RUSSIAN  JEW 

I 

EVEN  more  important,  even  more  urgent 
than  the  problem  of  Poland  is  the 
problem  of  Israel.  And,  unfortu- 
nately, the  two  problems  cannot  be  solved  sep- 
arately. The  Kingdom  of  Poland  and  the 
Kingdom  of  Israel  are  one  for  political  pur- 
poses as  well  as  for  economic  purposes.  Not 
only  do  Poland  and  Lithuania,  which  once 
formed  part  of  Greater  Poland,  include  within 
their  boundaries  the  great  majority  of  the  Rus- 
sian Jews — nearly  five  millions — -but  the  fu- 
ture of  the  Pole  is  indissolubly  bound  up  with 
the  future  of  the  Jew.  They  must  prosper  or 
decline  together.  It  is  impossible  to  liberate 
the  one  without  also  liberating  the  other.  It 
is  idle  to  speak  of  the  resurrection  of  Poland 
and  at  the  same  time  to  maintain  the  Hebrew 
population  in  perpetual  bondage.  You  cannot 
erect  in  Poland  a  free  self-governing  State,  and 
at  the  same  time  exclude  from  that  State  the 

153 


154  GREAT  RUSSIA 

most  enterprising,  the  most  intelligent,  the 
wealthiest  section  of  the  community. 

Not  only  is  the  Jewish  problem  the  most  im- 
portant and  the  most  urgent  of  all  Russian  po- 
litical problems,  it  is  also  the  most  difficult. 
Russian  reactionaries  invariably  assume  that  it 
concerns  Russia  alone.  Unfortunately  it  con- 
cerns the  whole  wide  world.  It  is  impossible 
to  discuss  the  position  of  the  Jew  in  the  Em- 
pire of  the  Tsar  apart  from  his  position  in 
Europe  and  America.  Nor  is  it  possible  to  un- 
derstand the  present  legal  status  of  the  Jew 
without  recalling  the  outstanding  facts  of  Jew- 
ish history.  The  following  brief  analysis  is, 
therefore,  indispensable  to  a  clear  intelligence 
of  the  question. 

II 

The  Kingdom  of  Israel  is  the  most  ancient 
kingdom  in  the  world,  and  withal  the  most 
universal  and  the  most  exclusive,  the  most 
powerful  and  the  most  perplexing.  The  annals 
of  the  Jews  go  back  to  the  dawn  of  human 
history,  and  their  records  constitute  the  sacred 
literature  of  all  Christian  nations.  They  are 
dispersed  over  the  habitable  globe.  They  were 
dispersed    before    the    birth    of   Christ.     The 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     155 

Greek  geographer,  Strabo,  for  instance,  men- 
tions that  there  was  not  a  city  in  the  world  of 
Greece  and  Rome  in  which  there  was  not  to  be 
found  a  Jewish  colony. 

No  other  people  surpass  them  in  versatility 
and  vitality.  They  adapt  themselves  to  every 
form  of  civilization,  but  they  refuse  them- 
selves to  be  assimilated.  They  preserve  their 
rites  and  customs,  and  retain  their  pride  of 
birth  as  the  chosen  people.  For  over  two  thou- 
sand years  they  have  been  persecuted,  but  they 
emerge  from  every  persecution  more  powerful 
than  ever,  and  their  power  is  everywhere  re- 
sented and  everywhere  resisted.  They  are  a 
distracting  problem  to  the  philosopher,  and 
their  contradictions  are  bewildering.  They  are 
intensely  tribal,  yet  they  are  cosmopolitan  and 
ubiquitous.  They  are  worshippers  of  Mam- 
mon, yet  no  people  has  such  a  passion  for  ideals. 
They  are  in  turn  extravagantly  rich  and  mis- 
erably poor,  insolently  proud  and  abjectly 
cringing.  They  are  now  on  the  side  of  the  op- 
pressor, now  heralds  of  revolt. 

Ill 

Most  misstatements  and  prejudices  about  the 
Jew    arise    from    the    fundamental    misstate- 


156  GREAT  RUSSIA 

ment  and  assumption  that  the  Jews  are  a  dis- 
tinct race,  one  of  the  few  pure  races  in  his- 
tory. To  the  Philosemite,  they  are  a  superior 
race.  Beaconsfield,  in  a  famous  chapter  of  his 
"Life  of  Lord  George  Bentinck,"  extols  the 
Jews  as  the  aristocracy  of  mankind.  On  the 
other  hand,  by  the  Antisemite,  the  Jew  is 
branded  with  irredeemable  inferiority.  Ac- 
cording to  Houston  Stewart  Chamberlain  the 
Jews  must  ever  be  an  inferior  type,  and  espe- 
cially are  they  morally  inferior  to  the  Aryan. 
They  can  never  be  assimilated.  This  idea,  sys- 
tematized in  the  famous  thesis  of  Gobineau  on 
the  "Equality  of  the  Races,"  has  been  reduced 
to  absurdity  in  Chamberlain's  striking  work 
"The  Foundations  of  the  Nineteenth  Century." 
The  distinguished  German  Imperialist  informs 
us  that  the  Jews  are  pre-eminently  a  servile 
people,  and  he  draws,  amongst  many  other  con- 
clusions, the  startling  inference  that  Christ  was 
not  a  Jew,  but  an  Aryan. 

I  confess  that  I  have  little  sympathy  with 
this  new  fetish  of  race.  It  is  true  that,  both 
through  intermarriage  and  social  segregation, 
the  Jews  retain  certain  physical  Jewish  charac- 
teristics, such  as  the  aquiline  nose.  But  mixed 
marriages  with  Christians  have  for  generations 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     157 

blended  the  type.  Mixed  marriages  in  the 
capital  of  the  German  Empire,  where  anti-Jew- 
ish sentiment  still  prevails,  have  increased  to 
25  per  cent.  And  even  if  we  admit  that  there 
still  exists  a  definite  Jewish  type,  that  does 
not  prove  the  unity  and  fixity  of  the  Jewish 
race.  Even  as  there  exists  a  Jewish  type, 
so  there  exists  a  British  type,  a  French  type, 
and  a  Russian  type.  Yet  it  would  be  ab- 
surd to  say  that  there  exists  one  British  race, 
one  French  race,  one  Russian  race,  and  it  is 
equally  absurd  to  say  that  there  exists  one  pure 
Jewish  race.  The  Jews  have  themselves  rec- 
ognized two  main  racial  types — the  aristocratic 
dolichocephalic  type  of  the  Sephardim  of  Spain 
and  Portugal,  and  the  democratic  brachyce- 
phalic  type  of  the  Aohkenarim  of  Poland  and 
Russia.  But,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  there  are 
not  two  Jewish  types,  there  are  fifty.  Any- 
one who  has  travelled  amongst  the  Jewries  of 
the  world  (and  I  have  visited  every  important 
ghetto  in  Africa  and  Asia,  in  America  and  Eu- 
rope) must  have  been  bewildered  by  the  va- 
riety of  physical  types.  And  without  visiting 
the  ghettos  of  the  world,  anyone  who  will  take 
the  trouble  to  look  at  the  two  hundred  strik- 
ing photographs  in  Dr.  Fischberg's  fascinating 


158  GREAT  RUSSIA 

volume  will  be  equally  convinced  of  the  fact. 
In  the  opinion  of  an  eminent  Jewish  thinker, 
Bernard  Lazare,  the  Jewish  type  has  not 
varied  less,  but  has  varied  more,  than  any 
other  racial  type.  And  the  reason  is  obvious: 
as  the  result  of  the  diaspora,  or  dispersion, 
the  Jews  have  been  subjected  more  continu- 
ously and  more  widely  than  any  other  nation 
to  different  surroundings,  and  the  life  of 
the  Jews  in  such  entirely  different  surround- 
ings as  Morocco  and  the  Caucasus,  Salonica 
and  London,  Jerusalem  and  New  York,  must 
of  necessity  have  resulted,  in  the  course 
of  centuries,  in  the  most  divergent  racial 
types. 

IV 

The  truth  is  that  the  unity  and  continuity  of 
the  Jew  is  not  physical,  it  is  moral.  The 
Jews  are  not  a  race,  they  are  a  nation.  Wher- 
ever they  have  gone,  they  have  remained  a  na- 
tion. We  are  too  apt  to  forget  that  a  nation 
is  not  a  geographical  expression.  The  Poles 
are  a  nation,  and  are  not  contained  within  geo- 
graphical limits.  Nor  does  a  nation  imply  a 
common  origin  or  blood  relationship.  The 
United  States  and  the  Russian  Empire  are  made 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     159 

up  of  a  score  of  different  races.  Nor  does  a 
nation  even  imply  community  of  language,  for 
the  German-speaking  Alsatians  were,  and  still 
are,  passionately  French  in  sentiment,  even  as 
the  French-Canadians  have  become  loyal  Brit- 
ish citizens.  No;  a  nation  is  a  collective  po- 
litical aggregate,  it  is  a  moral  personality.  It 
is  bound  together  by  common  religious  ideals, 
by  common  institutions,  by  common  traditions, 
by  common  loves  and  hatreds,  and,  most  of  all 
perhaps,  by  the  memories  of  common  glories 
and  common  sufferings.  The  bonds  which  hold 
a  nation  together  are  sentimental  and  spiritual, 
and  no  nation  has  ever  been  welded  together 
by  stronger  moral  and  spiritual  bonds  than  the 
Jewish  nation — bonds  so  strong,  indeed,  that 
the  Jews  have  remained  a  State  within  a  State, 
and  that  the  members  of  the  ghettos  all  over 
the  world  have  remained  denizens  of  the  same 
ideal  commonwealth. 


The  Jews  are  a  prolific  race,  and  they  have 
always  obeyed  the  Biblical  command,  "increase 
and  multiply."  Of  late  years  the  Jewish  birth- 
rate has  fallen  considerably,  but  that  decrease 
is  more  than  compensated  by  the  decrease  in 


160  GREAT  RUSSIA 

infant  mortality.  It  is  difficult  to  get  reliaoie 
statistics,  but  there  are  probably  more  than 
twelve  millions  of  Jews  in  both  hemispheres. 

Their  geographical  distribution  brings  out 
some  striking  facts.  In  the  first  place,  the  ma- 
jority of  Jews  are  congregated  in  large  towns. 
Of  the  two  million  American  Jews,  nearly  one 
million  are  settled  in  New  York  City.  This 
is,  of  course,  partly  due  to  the  fact  that  the 
Jews  have  generally  been  divorced  from  agri- 
cultural pursuits.  It  is  also  due  to  the  gre- 
garious instinct  of  a  weak  and  persecuted 
people. 

In  the  second  place,  the  bulk  of  the  Jews 
still  live  within  the  limits  of  the  ancient  king- 
dom of  Poland  (see  map  facing  page  153). 
Whereas  the  Jewish  population  of  Palestine  is 
only  sixty  thousand,  the  Jewish  population  in 
Greater  Poland  is  over  five  millions;  that  is  to 
say,  for  every  Jew  living  in  Palestine  there  are 
.nearly  a  hundred  Jews  living  in  Poland.  Po- 
land, therefore,  must  be  considered  as  the  geo- 
graphical centre  of  Israel.  In  Poland  they  are 
still  living  under  the  old  conditions.  They 
still  retain  their  picturesque  costumes,  and  still 
keep  their  old  customs.  They  still  live  shut  up 
in  their  ghettos,  they  still  speak  their  Yiddish 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     161 

language,  a  savoury  mixture  of  German  and 
Hebrew.  Of  the  many  strange  paradoxes  in 
the  romantic  history  of  Israel  not  the  least 
strange  is  this,  that  the  Jewish  nation  should 
have  found  a  home  and  refuge  in  that  desolate 
and  remote  corner  of  Eastern  Europe  once  ruled 
by  the  Jesuits,  and  that  the  destiny  of  the  Jews 
should  have  become  so  closely  associated  with 
the  fate  of  a  Catholic  people,  which,  like  the 
Jews,  has  only  an  ideal  existence;  which,  like 
the  Jews,  has  been  oppressed  and  suppressed, 
and  which,  like  the  Jews,  has  asserted  its  vital- 
ity in  the  face  of  economic  degradation  and  po- 
litical martyrdom. 

VI 

A  few  essential  facts  emerge  from  the  most 
cursory  analysis  of  statistical  data,  and  from 
the  most  superficial  observation  of  present-day 
social  and  political  conditions,  and  those  facts 
emphatically  contradict  some  widespread  as- 
sumptions about  the  Jews. 

The  first  current  assumption  is  that  the  Jews 
as  a  nation  are  rich.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the 
enormous  majority  of  the  Jews  are  wretchedly 
poor,  the  enormous  majority  are  a  proletariate 
exploited  and  sweated  by  ruthless  capitalists. 


162  GREAT  RUSSIA 

Nothing  could  exceed  the  misery  and  squalor 
of  the  ghetto  of  Old  Warsaw,  unless  it  be  the 
ghetto  of  New  York. 

The  second  assumption  is  that  the  bulk  of 
the  Jews  have  now  received  equal  political 
rights,  and  that  the  persecution  of  ages  has  at 
last  come  to  a  close.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the 
enormous  majority  of  Jews  still  suffer  from 
civil  and  political  disabilities. '  It  is  only  in 
Anglo-Saxon  communities  that  they  have  at- 
tained to  political  equality.  But  even  there 
their  position  is  uncertain,  and  in  the  United 
States  there  are  already  clear  indications  of  a 
rise  of  anti-Semitism.  As  for  France,  the  re- 
cent formidable  epidemic  of  anti-Semitism  and 
the  terrible  crisis  of  the  Dreyfus  affair  clearly 
show  how  precarious  the  condition  of  the  Jews 
still  remains,  even  under  the  most  favourable 
conditions.  In  Germany  no  Jew  before  this 
war  could  hold  a  commission  in  the  army  or 
hold  a  post  in  the  diplomatic  service,  and  they 
are  shut  out  from  the  higher  ranks  of  the  Civil 
Service. 

But  it  is  especially  to  the  north-east  of  Eu- 
rope, inhabited  by  two-thirds  of  the  Jewish 
population  of  the  world,  that  we  must  look  to 
form  a  true  idea  of  the  present  position  of  the 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     163 

Jews.  In  Roumania  they  are  denied  the  right 
of  citizenship,  notwithstanding  the  solemn 
pledges  of  the  Treaty  of  Berlin  inserted  by 
Lord  Beaconsfield.  In  Russia  they  are  still 
subjected  to  mediaeval  oppression.  They  are 
periodically  expelled  and  systematically  massa- 
cred. Jew  "baiting"  is  a  political  Russian 
sport,  and  "pogroms,"  or  organized  massacres, 
are  resorted  to  by  the  black  hundreds  with  the 
complicity  of  the  Russian  Government  when- 
ever the  reactionary  parties  find  themselves  in 
a  difficulty. 

VII 

In  the  course  of  their  tragic  history  the  Jew- 
ish nation  have  revealed  certain  striking  pecul- 
iarities which  distinguish  them  from  all  others. 
Morally,  they  are  presumably  neither  better 
nor  worse  than  other  communities.  If  their 
morality  is  inferior  in  their  relations  to  alien 
nations,  on  the  other  hand  their  tribal  and  do- 
mestic morality  is  probably  higher.  They  are 
sober  and  thrifty,  industrious  and  charitable. 
Intellectually,  they  are  one  of  the  most  gifted 
peoples  of  the  world.  The  Jewish  mind  has 
been  developed  in  the  hard  school  of  persecu- 
tion.    All  through  the  severe  struggle  for  life 


164  GREAT  RUSSIA 

to  whicn  tney  have  been  subjected  intellect, 
cunning,  shrewdness,  were  the  only  weapons 
that  could  be  opposed  to  the  brutal  force  of 
their  Christian  enemies.  Nor  ought  we  to  for- 
get that  their  wandering  habits,  their  linguistic 
attainments,  their  world-wide  experience,  must 
needs  have  broadened  their  outlook,  and  must 
have  predestined  them  for  their  special  func- 
tion as  intellectual  middlemen  and  interpre- 
ters. Every  educated  Jew  knows  half  a  dozen 
languages,  has  travelled  in  a  dozen  countries, 
in  each  of  which  he  has  probably  a  family  con- 
nexion. The  Jews  have  always  respected  in- 
tellect and  ability.  Like  the  Christian  nations, 
they  have  had  their  conflicts  between  philosophy 
and  theology,  between  the  letter  and  the  spirit. 
Readers  of  Mr.  Zangwill's  "Children  of  the 
Ghetto"  and  "Dreamers  of  the  Ghetto"  know 
that  they  have  had  their  Obscurantists  in  the 
Talmudists  and  the  Kabbalists.  They  have 
persecuted  their  Spinozas  and  their  Mendels- 
sohns.  But  seldom  with  the  Jews  have  ideas 
been  at  a  discount.  They  may  worship  money 
greatly,  but  they  worship  intellect  more,  with 
the  result  that  in  the  specifically  intellectual 
professions,  in  medicine,  in  law,  and  in  science, 
the  proportion  of  distinguished  Jews  is  much 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     165 

larger  than  that  of  Christians.  In  journalism 
they  have  attained  a  redoubtable  position ;  they 
may  be  said  to  control  the  world's  Press,  and 
through  the  Press  they  control  public  opinion 
and  public  policy. 

Keen  and  subtle  as  the  Jewish  intellect  has 
been,  and  occasionally  powerfully  constructive, 
from  the  days  of  Spinoza  to  the  days  of  Berg- 
son,  it  was,  perhaps,  to  be  expected  that  they 
should  be  even  more  successful  in  destruction 
than  in  construction.  As  has  been  pointed  out 
by  a  French  critic,  Monsieur  Muret,  the  Jews 
have  ever  been  heralds  of  revolt.  In  Slav 
countries  they  have  played  a  conspicuous  part 
in  the  revolutionary  movement.  Even  in  Ger- 
many they  have  been  in  the  forefront  of  pro- 
gressive politics.  The  German  Socialists  have 
produced  leading  men  of  action,  like  Liebknecht 
and  Bebel,  but  practically  all  the  thinking 
heads  of  the  social  democracy  have  been  Israel- 
ites— Lassalle  and  Marx,  Engels  and  Singer, 
Kautsky,  and  Bernstein. 

VIII 

Of  all  the  peculiar  Jewish  characteristics,  the 
capacity  for  finance  is  the  most  conspicuous. 
Almost  from  the  beginning  of  the  diaspora  the 


166  GREAT  RUSSIA 

Jews  have  been  the  moneylenders  and  usurers 
of  the  world.  And  it  is  because  of  their  pro- 
pensity to  usury  as  much  as  for  their  national 
exclusivism  that  they  have  drawn  upon  them- 
selves the  hatred  of  the  community. 

Of  course,  the  Jews  argue,  and  rightly  argue, 
that  they  have  been  compelled  to  become  the 
cosmopolitan  moneylenders,  simply  because 
they  have  been  systematically  debarred  by 
Christian  intolerance  from  any  other  profession. 
They  could  not  be  agriculturists,  because  they 
were  not  allowed  to  own  land,  because  land  in 
the  Middle  Ages  was  only  held  by  military  ten- 
ure. They  could  not  be  artizans,  because  they 
could  not  be  admitted  to  the  semi-religious 
trade  guilds  and  corporations.  They  could  not 
be  soldiers,  because  they  were  not  allowed  into 
the  army  on  equal  conditions. 

But  there  is  a  further  plea  of  justification 
which  may  be  adduced  by  the  Jews.  The  ulti- 
mate reason  why  the  Jew  became  the  inevitable 
broker  was  the  fact  that  moneylending  was 
strictly  forbidden  to  Christians,  both  by  the 
Canon  Law  and  the  Civil  Law.  The  Roman 
Catholic  Church,  acting  on  the  counsel  of  per- 
fection contained  in  Luke  vi,  35,  prohibited  all 
lending  out  of  money  at  any  interest  whatso- 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     167 

ever.  To  lend  money  to  the  necessitous  was  a 
work  of  piety,  hence  the  origin  of  the  "Mont  de 
Piete,"  or  public  gratuitous  pawnshop,  which 
even  to-day  still  retains  the  spirit  of  the  original 
institution,  and  which  is  peculiar  to  Roman 
Catholic  countries.  The  Roman  Catholic 
Church  took  the  heroic  and  quixotic  policy  of 
branding  all  acceptance  of  interest  as  usury.  It 
was  a  suicidal  policy,  for  it  paralyzed  the  trade 
of  the  Middle  Ages.  It  proved  an  impossible 
policy,  because  the  Catholic  precept  had  to  be 
constantly  infringed,  and  it  was  violated  even 
by  Bishops  and  Popes.  Popes  were  compelled 
to  appeal  to  Jewish  usurers  in  their  financial 
need,  as  they  were  compelled  to  appeal  to  Jew- 
ish physicians  in  their  physical  need.  Whole 
libraries  of  casuistical  treatises  were  written 
trying  to  relax  the  original  Catholic  precept, 
and  to  reconcile  it  with  the  practical  require- 
ments of  the  day.  The  final  result  was  that, 
first,  the  Jews  and,  later  on,  the  Lombards  and 
Cahorsins  obtained  the  monopoly  of  European 
finance.  The  Mediaeval  Church  reasoned  with 
regard  to  the  Jewish  moneylender  as  the  mod- 
ern State  reasons  with  regard  to  the  prostitute. 
We  are  told  that  prostitution  is  an  inevitable 
evil.     Therefore    some    women    must    be    set 


168  GREAT  RUSSIA 

apart,  and  their  infamous  but  necessary  trade 
must  be  regulated.  Similarly,  moneylending  is 
an  inevitable  evil;  therefore  some  people — 
the  Jews — must  be  allowed  to  practise  it.  But 
their  odious  business  must  be  strictly  controlled, 
and  they  must  be  periodically  deprived  of  part 
of  their  spoils. 

IX 

Medieval  intolerance  has  gone.  Religious 
persecution  and  religious  wars  have  ceased. 
Yet  the  Jewish  problem  remains  as  acute  as 
ever.  Politically,  it  remains  as  acute  because 
the  national  exclusivism  of  the  circumsized 
people  still  survives.  The  Jews  still  consider 
themselves  as  exiles  in  the  land  where  they 
choose  to  settle.  Economically,  the  Jewish 
problem  is  even  more  acute  than  ever,  because 
the  enormous  development  of  national  and  in- 
ternational finance  has  given  to  the  Jewish  peo- 
ple opportunities  which  they  never  had  before. 
National  exclusivism  and  international 
finance,  and  not  religious  intolerance,  are  the 
root  causes  of  anti-Semitism,  and  as  long  as 
those  causes  are  operative  the  effect  will  remain. 
As  long  as  the  Jews  constitute  distinct  colonies 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     169 

within  the  community,  as  long  as  the  Jews  spe- 
cialize in  the  predatory  and  parasitic  activities 
of  finance,  so  long  shall  we  witness  outbursts  of 
anti-Semitic  feeling. 

But  signs  are  not  wanting  that  far-reaching 
changes  are  taking  place.  Intermarriages  be- 
tween Jews  and  Christians  have,  as  we  pointed 
out,  enormously  developed  in  recent  years;  so 
rapidly,  indeed,  have  they  developed  that  Pro- 
fessor Ruppin,  in  his  recent  striking  book,  an- 
nounces the  impending  absorption  of  the  Jewish 
people.  On  the  other  hand,  the  exploitation  of 
capitalism  is  threatened  by  the  universal  ad- 
vance of  Socialism  and  the  awakening  of  the  so- 
cial conscience.  With  the  decrease  of  the  om- 
nipotence of  capitalism  the  power  of  the  Jews 
will  also  decrease.  It  has  been  said  that  the 
Jew  is  a  microbe  which  only  attacks  unsound 
constitutions,  but  which  is  harmless  to  healthy 
constitutions.  This  much  is  true,  that  the  Jew 
is  not  a  cause,  but  a  result.  It  is  the  bad  con- 
stitution of  the  body  politic  which  develops  the 
bad  qualities  of  the  Jew.  The  Jews  cannot  be 
held  responsible  for  the  tyranny  of  modern  capi- 
talism, even  though  they  have  profited  by  it. 
On  the  contrary,  no  writers  have  denounced 


170  GREAT  RUSSIA 

more  fiercely  than  Jewish  writers  the  iniquity 
of  modern  conditions. 

With  the  breakdown  of  Jewish  national  ex- 
clusivism,  with  the  dawn  of  social  justice,  the 
last  vestiges  of  anti-Semitism  will  probably 
disappear,  and  the  Jewish  problem  will  solve  it- 
self. 

X 

But  the  Jewish  problem  cannot  solve  itself  in 
other  parts  of  the  world  as  long  as  it  has  not 
found  a  solution  in  Russia,  which  is  the  new 
Palestine,  which  is  the  very  heart  and  centre 
of  Israel.  The  Jewish  problem  cannot  solve 
itself  as  long  as  five  million  Hebrews  remain 
the  victims  of  a  most  odious  mediaeval  oppres- 
sion. Unfortunately,  in  the  course  of  the  last 
twenty  years,  the  position  of  the  Jew  in  Russia 
has  not  become  better,  rather  has  it  become 
worse.  The  Jew  is  still  cooped  up  within  that 
huge  Polish  ghetto  called  the  "Pale."  He  is 
still  forbidden  access  to  the  land.  He  is  still 
tracked  by  the  police  and  periodically  deci- 
mated by  organized  massacre.  And  the  po- 
groms are  becoming  more  frequent  and  more 
savage.  He  is  still  forbidden  entrance  to  the 
Civil    Service.     He   is   still   largely   excluded 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     171 

from  the  Liberal  Professions,  only  from  5  to 
7  per  cent,  of  Jews  being  allowed  into  the  Rus- 
sian Gymnasia  and  the  Universities.  The  Jew 
has  had  no  share  in  the  partial  political  enfran- 
chisement which  followed  the  Russo-Japanese 
War,  and  he  is  suffering  throughout  the  present 
war  more  than  any  other  nation,  more  even  than 
the  martyred  Belgians  and  Serbians. 

XI 

The  greatest  religious  philosopher  and  political 
leader  the  Russian  race  has  produced,  the  Cath- 
olic Vladimir  Soloviov,  has  put  in  a  nutshell  the 
arguments  in  favor  of  the  Jews : 

"Poland  presents  a  remarkable  phenomenon. 
The  social  elements  there  are  represented  by 
separate  nationalities.  The  Russians  consti- 
tute the  agricultural  population  of  the  villages. 
The  Upper  Class  is  constituted  by  Poles.  The 
Industrial  population  of  the  towns  by  Hebrews. 
If  the  Hebrews,  not  only  under  favourable  but 
generally  under  most  unfavourable  circum- 
stances, manage  to  establish  a  firm  hold  in  the 
cities  of  Western  Russia,  that  simply  proves 
that  they  are  more  capable  than  the  Russian 
peasant  or  the  Polish  nobility  to  constitute  an 
industrial  class.     If,  on  the  other  hand,  such  an 


172  GREAT  RUSSIA 

industrial  class  in  every  country  instead  of 
helping  the  agricultural  population  is  found  to 
live  at  their  expense,  it  is  not  to  be  wondered 
at  that  the  Hebrews,  wherever  they  constitute 
the  whole  industrial  class,  should  also  appear 
as  the  exploiters  of  the  people.  It  is  not  they 
who  created  such  a  situation.  They  were 
schooled  too  long  in  the  school  of  the  Polish 
nobility  which  equally  oppressed  both  the  Jews 
and  the  Polish  serfs.  But  quite  apart  from  the 
Polish  nobility,  is  not  the  selfish  oppression  of 
one  class  over  the  others  the  universal  rule  of 
social  life  in  the  whole  of  Europe?  If  our 
peasants  suffered  from  the  oppression  of  the 
Jews,  who  only  exist  by  virtue  of  the  helpless 
social  economic  situation  of  those  peasants, 
that  situation  was  not  caused  by  the  Hebrews. 
The  needy  peasant  goes  to  the  Jew  simply  be- 
cause his  own  people  refuse  to  help  him.  And 
if  the  Jews  who  assist  the  peasant  exploit  him, 
they  do  not  do  so  because  they  are  Jews,  but 
because  they  have  obtained  the  monopoly  of 
national  finance  which  is  entirely  based  on  the 
exploitation  of  the  people.  The  evil  is  not  due 
to  the  Jew,  nor  to  finance,  but  to  the  immoral 
supremacy  of  finance,  and  that  supremacy  was 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     173 

not  created  by  the  Jews.  It  is  not  the  Jew 
who  separated  the  provinces  of  political  econ- 
omy from  that  of  morality  and  religion.  It  is 
civilized  Europe  which,  having  based  political 
economy  on  impious  and  inhuman  principles, 
reproaches  the  Jew  because  they  follow  their 
principles." 

XII 

The  worst  of  the  present  legislation  against  the 
Jew  is  that  it  defeats  its  purpose.  It  is  not 
only  odious;  it  is  gratuitous.  It  is  futile.  It 
is  politically  insane.  We  are  told  that  the  Jew 
must  be  denied  access  to  the  land  for  the  pro- 
tection of  the  helpless  moujik,  but  the  present 
legislation  by  preventing  the  Jew  from  owning 
land,  from  becoming  an  independent  fanner, 
makes  him  instead  a  constant  menace  to  the 
independent  farmer,  dooms  him  to  the  odious 
profession  of  a  usurer  and  a  publican.  The 
Jew  may  not  own  land,  but  he  may  lend  money 
at  usurer's  interest  to  the  peasant  who  owns  the 
land,  and  may  thus  have  the  peasant  and  land- 
owner at  his  mercy. 

We  are  told  that  if  the  Jew  were  admitted 
in  any  large  numbers  to  the  Liberal  Professions, 


174  GREAT  RUSSIA 

he  would  in  a  short  time  invade  every  career  to 
the  detriment  of  the  Russian  born.  That  as- 
sumption is  a  gratuitous  insult  to  the  intelli- 
gence and  the  ability  of  the  Russian  people. 
It  is  an  admission  that  a  Russian  doctor,  a 
Russian  lawyer,  a  Russian  engineer  have  no 
chance  in  any  fair  competition  with  the  He- 
brew. I  cannot  believe  that  the  Russian  is 
so  hopelessly  inferior  to  the  Hebrew.  I  do 
not  dread  competition  for  the  Russian.  I  be- 
lieve, on  the  contrary,  that  all  that  the  Rus- 
sian people  want  is  competition  and  not  Govern- 
ment protection.  Competition  with  the  Jew, 
so  far  from  being  detrimental  to  the  Russian, 
will  awaken  his  dormant  capacities.  One  ex- 
planation of  the  present  arbitrary  legislation, 
and  that  is  probably  one  reason  why  it  is  being 
retained,  is  that  it  gives  both  the  police  and 
the  bureaucracy  unlimited  opportunities  of 
graft.  It  is  an  open  secret  that  the  regulations 
which  restrict  to  the  proportion  of  5  to  7  per 
cent,  the  admission  of  the  Jew  to  the  Higher 
Government  Schools,  are  being  constantly 
evaded,  and  that  wealthy  Jews  by  paying  a 
sufficient  bribe  to  the  authorities  can  always 
secure  admission. 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     175 

XIII 

We  are  further  told  that  the  Jew  must  not  be 
given  the  same  civil  rights  as  the  Russian, 
because  even  when  he  becomes  naturalized 
he  remains  an  alien.  But  the  present  legisla- 
tion only  succeeds  in  making  him  an  irresponsi- 
ble enemy  of  Russia,  whilst  at  the  same  time 
keeping  him  settled  in  huge  numbers  in  one  of 
the  most  vital  parts  of  the  Empire,  like  a  fes- 
tering wound  in  the  Russian  body  politic. 

If  it  be  really  true  that  the  Jew  is  a  hostile 
alien,  and  that  he  can  never  be  assimilated, 
then  the  logical  policy  for  the  Government 
would  be  to  expel  that  alien  even  as  Louis  XIV 
expelled  the  Huguenots,  even  as  the  Spaniards 
expelled  the  Moors.  But  the  existing  legisla- 
tion inflicts  a  maximum  of  suffering  without 
producing  any  political  result. 

We  are  finally  told  that  even  as  the  Russian 
people  must  be  protected  by  depriving  the  Jew 
of  civil  rights,  so  the  Russian  State  must  be 
protected  by  depriving  the  Jew  of  political 
rights.  For  the  Jew  is  a  Revolutionist,  an 
Anarchist  and  no  Government  could  be  carried 
on  if  he  were  conceded  full  political  rights. 


176  GREAT  RUSSIA 

But  here,  again,  the  present  legislation  entirely 
defeats  its  purpose.  It  only  makes  the  Jew 
into  a  passionate  opponent  of  the  existing 
Government.  If  it  be  difficult  to  govern  with 
the  Jew,  it  is  impossible  to  govern  with  the 
Jew  as  an  irreconcilable  enemy.  For  even  the 
strongest  Russian  Government  is  not  a  match 
for  the  Jew.  For  the  Jew  is  able  to  use 
against  the  Government  all  the  driving  power 
of  hatred  and  revenge,  all  the  resources  of  a 
subtle  intellect,  all  the  power  of  the  Press,  and 
he  also  has  the  power  of  turning  against  the 
established  authorities  the  two  most  potent 
forces  in  the  world — international  finance  and 
international  opinion,  as  the  allies  are  finding 
out  to  their  cost. 

XIV 

There  is  only  one  solution  to  the  Jewish  prob- 
lem, and  that  is  a  complete  reversal  of  the  old 
policy  of  intolerance  and  inequality  and  iniq- 
uity, an  uncompromising  acceptance  of  the 
principle  that  liberty  with  all  its  risks  and  perils 
is  preferable  to  protection  with  all  its  false  se- 
curity. 

That  solution  is  imperative  not  only  in  the 
interests  of  the  Jew  but  in  the  interests  of  the 


PROBLEM  OF  RUSSIAN  JEW     177 

Russian  people,  and  in  the  interests  of  political 
freedom  generally.  A  political  freedom  which 
would  be  doled  out  to  some  sections  of  the  peo- 
ple and  withheld  from  others,  a  freedom  of  the 
Press  which  would  be  granted  to  some  papers 
and  refused  to  others,  a  religious  toleration 
which  would  be  conceded  to  the  Catholics  and 
refused  to  the  Jews  or  the  Armenians  will 
not  work.  There  is  a  limit  to  political  con- 
tradiction, even  in  a  land  of  contrasts  such 
as  Russia.  The  Russian  bureaucracy  and  the 
Russian  Church  must  give  up  their  traditional 
policy  of  racial  and  religious  antagonism,  or 
they  will  inevitably  revert  to  the  evil  of  their 
ways. 

And  let  us  hear  no  more  of  the  feeble  argu- 
ment that  the  Russian  people  have  perfectly 
legitimate  grievances  against  the  Jews,  that  they 
have  old  scores  to  pay  off.  I  know  they  have. 
It  would  have  been  a  miracle,  indeed,  if  the  de- 
grading legislation  imposed  for  centuries  upon 
the  inmates  of  the  ghetto  and  the  ghastly  perse- 
cution they  have  suffered  had  not  left  its  mark 
on  the  Hebrew  race.  But  what  have  a  thou- 
sand legitimate  grievances  to  do  with  the  con- 
cession of  political  rights?  In  so  far  as  the 
Jews  act  dishonourably  in  private  life,  they 


178  GREAT  RUSSIA 

must  be  prepared  to  pay  the  penalty,  and  no 
State  can  protect  them  against  the  contempt  or 
the  hatred  of  the  community.  But  the  retali- 
ation of  individuals  for  injustice  done  in  pri- 
vate life  cannot  be  allowed  to  the  Government. 
The  argument  of  revenge  or  retribution  is  there- 
fore entirely  irrelevant.  To  indulge  in  a  spirit 
of  vindictiveness  is  not  a  duty  of  the  State. 
The  State  is  not  a  Corsican  community  organ- 
ized for  vendetta,  it  is  not  even  an  instrument 
of  moral  retaliation.  Its  function  is  not  to  dis- 
pense retributive  justice.  The  one  primary 
and  essential  duty  of  a  State  is  to  secure  equal 
and  civil  rights  to  all  its  citizens,  and  the  Rus- 
sian State  of  to-morrow  will  have  to  discharge 
that  duty  to  all  the  members  of  the  Hebrew 
race.  \ 


CHAPTER  XVI 

THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION  AND 
THE  RUSSIAN  REVOLUTION 

THE  following  pages  were  written  in 
Moscow  nine  years  ago  under  the  di- 
rect impression  of  the  Civil  War  which 
shook  the  Russian  Empire  to  its  very  founda- 
tions. Such  was  the  elemental  violence  of  the 
political  hurricane  that  every  European  pub- 
licist predicted  the  imminent  fall  of  Russian 
Tzardom.  From  a  close  examination  of  the 
situation  and  from  a  systematic  calculation  of 
the  political  forces  at  work,  I  was  driven  to 
adopt  quite  a  different  conclusion.  I  confi- 
dently predicted  that  nothing  would  happen. 
Nothing  did  happen.  Tzardom  weathered  the 
storm.  (The  Government  was  stronger  after 
the  war  than  before.  The  revolution  proved 
abortive. 

The  revolution  collapsed.  But  it  was  easy 
to  foresee  that  the  revolutionary  forces  would 
only  be  driven  back  to  gather  strength  for  an- 
other and  a  more  determined  onslaught.     The 

great  Italian  thinker,  Vico,  the  father  of  the 

179 


180  GREAT  RUSSIA 

modern  philosophy  of  history,  tells  us  that 
human  history  is  only  a  succession  of  corsi 
and  ricorsi — of  periodical  recurrences — that 
mankind  moves  in  a  spiral,  each  successive  gen- 
eration, reverting  to  the  point  from  which  it 
started,  but  each  time  starting  afresh  on  a 
higher  level.  Contemporary  Russian  history 
strikingly  illustrates  this  theory  of  "recur- 
rences." The  internal  political  situation  in 
Russia  after  the  European  War  will  be  sub- 
stantially the  same  as  that  which  existed  after 
the  Russo-Japanese  War.  All  the  difficulties 
which  confronted  the  Government  in  1906  will 
still  confront  the  Government  in  1916.  Nearly 
all  the  reforms  which  demanded  a  solution  then 
still  demand  a  solution  to-day.  The  land  ques- 
tion is  still  largely  unsolved.  Decentralization 
and  Home  Rule  are  wanted  as  urgently  as  ever. 
Finland  and  Poland  still  demand  autonomy. 
An  independent  judicature,  an  independent 
Church,  an  independent  Press,  are  still  pious 
desiderata.  Armenians  and  Jews  are  still  suf- 
fering from  shocking  disabilities  and  still  re- 
quire protection  against  organized  massacre. 

The  only  difference  between  the  political 
situation  in  1906  and  the  situation  to-day  is 
this,  that  the  demands  for  reform  will  be  far 


THE  REVOLUTION  181 

more  pressing,  and  that  the  reforms  themselves 
have  come  much  more  nearer  maturity.;  It  will 
be  far  more  difficult  to  refuse  satisfaction  after 
a  great  democratic  and  national  conflict.  As  I 
have  attempted  to  prove  in  the  course  of  this 
book,  a  great  national  war  in  Russia  has  al- 
ways acted  as  a  Revolutionary  force  in  the  po- 
litical development  of  Russia.  It  seems,  there- 
fore, a  safe  prediction  that  the  Russian  Empire 
after  this  war  will  undergo  a  more  far-reaching 
transformation  than  at  any  other  period  since 
Peter  the  Great.  The  only  doubtful  point  is 
whether  the  Government  will  take  a  bold 
initiative  as  Alexander  II  did  in  the  sixties, 
or  whether  reform  will  come  as  the  result  of  a 
social  upheaval  as  happened  in  1906. 

Whatever  the  immediate  future  may  have  in 
store  for  the  Russian  people,  I  have  no  hesita- 
tion as  to  the  policy  which  ought  to  be  followed 
on  the  morrow  of  the  war,  nor  is  there  a  single 
paragraph  in  the  following  pages  which  I  would 
be  prepared  to  alter.  The  forecasts  which  I 
made  then  I  still  confidently  make  to-day.  The 
remedies  which  I  propounded  then  I  propound 
still  more  emphatically  to-day.  More  firmly 
than  ever  do  I  believe  that  salvation  will  not 
come  through  a  perennial  and  sterile  conflict 


182  GREAT  RUSSIA 

between  two  irreconcilable  hostile  forces,  be- 
tween a  powerless  Executive  and  an  all-power- 
ful Revolutionary  Convention.  Rather  will 
salvation  come  through  the  systematic  co-oper- 
ation between  a  strong  Executive  and  an  Assem- 
bly of  wise,  moderate,  practical  and  patriotic 
representatives  ready  to  meet  the  Government 
half-way  in  the  path  of  necessary  reforms. 
More  firmly  than  ever  do  I  believe  that  salva- 
tion will  come  not  primarily  through  a  central- 
ized Parliament  superimposed  upon  a  central- 
ized bureaucracy,  but  through  the  releasing  of 
new  political  forces,  through  the  establishment 
of  Autonomous  Provinces  and  Independent  Na- 
tionalities, and  especially  through  the  releasing 
of  the  spiritual  forces,  through  the  creation  of 
Independent  Churches.  More  firmly  than  ever 
do  I  believe  that  an  unconditional  concession 
of  religious  liberty,  an  honest  application  of 
the  Edict  of  Toleration  of  1905,  must  be  the 
antecedent  of  political  liberty. 

Russian  reformers  are  too  much  inclined  to 
believe  in  the  servile  imitation  of  the  British 
Parliamentary  regime,  in  the  adoption  of  the 
British  Party  System.  The  trouble  is  that 
whereas  there  are  only  three  Parties  in  the 
British  House  of  Commons  there  are  twenty 


THE  REVOLUTION  183 

conflicting  Parties  in  the  Russian  Duma,  and  it 
will  readily  be  conceded  that  even  an  ideal 
British  Parliament  could  not  work  very 
smoothly  under  such  conditions.  If  the  Rus- 
sian Reformers  must  be  guided  by  British  prece- 
dents, let  them  be  inspired  by  the  wonderful 
example  of  the  British  Empire,  which  is  not  a 
centralized  Empire,  but  a  world-wide  feder- 
ation of  self-governing  communities,  and  where 
the  Crown  is  but  the  visible  symbol  of  political 
unity,  the  arbiter  of  all  nationalities,  the  rally- 
ing centre  of  Imperial  loyalty.  It  is  only 
through  the  Russian  Empire  being  converted 
into  such  a  federation  of  free  communities,  it  is 
only  through  deliberately  renouncing  national 
and  racial  antagonism,  through  repudiating  re- 
ligious intolerance,  that  the  Russian  people  will 
work  out  their  own  destinies. 

The  historical  inquiry  before  us  is  not  one  of 
purely  academic  interest.  It  is  one  of  supreme 
practical  importance.  The  political  condition 
of  Russia  to-day  is  very  like  the  political  con- 
dition of  France  in  1789.  To  the  Russian 
Revolutionists,  the  French  Revolution  is  not  a 
dead  and  distant  past,  it  is  a  living  present;  it 
continues,  and  it  will  continue  for  a  generation 
to  come,  to  exert  a  subtle  and  profound  influ- 


184  GREAT  RUSSIA 

ence  which  it  is  impossible  to  overrate.  Even 
as  the  leaders  of  the  French  Revolution  were 
haunted  by  the  memories  of  ancient  Rome,  and 
by  the  heroes  of  Plutarch,  the  Russian  Revolu- 
tionists are  obsessed  and  possessed  by  the  tragic 
events  of  1789,  and  the  heroes  of  the  Terror. 
These  events  and  these  men  are  to  them  a  per- 
manent source  of  inspiration.  Every  psycholo- 
gist and  sociologist  who  has  investigated  the 
power  of  hypnotic  suggestion  and  the  laws  of 
imitation  will  realize  the  enormous  significance 
of  the  fact,  all  the  more  so  because  the  Russian 
Revolution  must  be  to  some  extent  a  purely 
artificial  revolution  and  not  a  spontaneous  out- 
burst of  elemental  forces.  Nearly  all  the  lead- 
ers belonged  to  the  intellectual  classes,  to 
what  is  characteristically  called  in  Russia  the 
"Intelliguenz"  And  these  leaders  have  been 
brought  up  on  the  theories  of  1789,  they  have 
been  fed  on  the  "Immortal  Principles."  They 
appear  to  me  like  students  who  are  repeating 
to  themselves  lessons  vaguely  understood,  or 
like  actors  who  want  to  rehearse  the  same  tragic 
parts  over  again.  They  would  like  to  persuade 
the  world  that  the  Russian  people  are  engaged 
in  the  same  struggle  for  freedom  and  equality, 
and  that  their  triumph  would  inaugurate  a  new 


Ki 


THE  REVOLUTION  185 

era  for  Russia  and  for  mankind.  They  insist 
that  the  one  event  is  as  inevitable  as  the  other, 
that  resistance  is  equally  futile,  that  any  form 
of  opposition  will  only  make  the  ultimate  tri- 
umph more  decisive  and  more  bloody,  and  that 
Russia  is  doomed  to  travel  the  same  road  as 
the  France  of  1789 — from  Despotism  through 
Terror,  towards  Liberty. 

We  saw  in  1905  the  scenes  familiar  to  every 
student  of  history,  the  same  passions,  the  same 
demagogues,  the  same  spirit  of  optimism;  we 
listened  with  the  same  grim  irony  to  the  same 
debates  on  the  abolition  of  the  death  penalty  on 
the  very  eve  of  a  life-and-death  struggle  in 
which  the  same  philanthropists  threatened  us 
that  rivers  of  blood  must  flow.  And  did  we  not 
seem  to  hear  the  ring  of  the  same  historical 
words'?  How  many  revolutionists  must  have 
repeated  on  the  dissolution  of  the  first  Duma  the 
words  of  Mirabeau:  Nous  sommes  ici  par  la 
Volonte  du  peuple  et  nous  n'en  sortirons  que  par 
la  force  des  bayonnettes!  How  many  of  them 
were  nerving  themselves  to  action  with  the 
dictum  of  Danton:  De  VAudace,  et  encore  de 
Vaudace  et  tou jours  de  Vaudacel  How  many 
of  them  challenged  their  enemies  with  the 
Frenchman's  outburst :     Jetons  leur  en  defi  une 


186  GREAT  RUSSIA 

tete  de  roil  And  how  many  Conservatives  did 
repeat  the  pathetic  lamentation:  0  Liberte. 
que  de  crimes  sont  commis  en  ton  noml 

It  must,  therefore,  be  a  subject  of  the  most 
absorbing  interest  closely  to  investigate  how 
far  the  analogies  are  real  or  misleading,  and 
whether  we  may  infer  and  expect  similar  con- 
clusions from  similar  causes  and  similar  ante- 
cedents; whether  history  is  actually  repeating 
itself  and  will  give  us  a  rehearsal,  on  a  larger 
scene,  of  the  tragedy  which  was  enacted  a  hun- 
dred and  twenty  years  ago. 

I.  Analogies  Between  the  French  Revo- 
lution and  the  Russian  Revolution 

But  it  must  be  understood  that  the  question 
before  us  is  not  merely  whether  there  are  cer- 
tain broad  and  general  resemblances  between 
the  two  situations.  Such  broad  analogies  are 
only  what  one  would  naturally  expect.  All 
revolutionary  outbursts,  like  the  catastrophes  of 
elemental  nature,  have  some  common  features, 
because  human  nature  in  such  emergencies  re- 
mains the  same  in  all  times  and  in  all  climes. 
Everywhere,  whether  in  Athens,  in  Rome,  or  in 
London,  we  find  at  work  the  same  forces,  the 
same  motives  disguised  under  different  princi- 


THE  REVOLUTION  187 

pies.  Everywhere  the  people  are  used  as  tools 
and  dupes  in  a  movement  which  succeeds  only 
through  them,  but  not  always^with  benefit  to 
them.  Sic  vos  non  vobis.  Everywhere  we  wit- 
ness the  same  plot  unfolding  in  the  same  man- 
ner :  first  an  effete  and  corrupt  Despotism — then 
Anarchy  and  Terror,  and  finally  a  Military  Dic- 
tatorship: Caesar  or  Medici,  Cromwell  or  Na- 
poleon. CV   Ttlhs  % 

It  is  not  such  broad  human  analogies  whicn 
we  are  investigating.  It  must  be  obvious  to 
the  most  superficial  observer  that  there  are  be- 
tween the  two  situations  analogies  much  more 
special,  much  more  unexpected,  much  more 
striking.  Indeed  so  striking  do  they  seem,  that 
the  Russian  Revolution  of  1905  may  verily  ap- 
pear at  first  sight  as  a  second  edition,  alas,  not 
always  corrected  nor  improved,  but  only  ex- 
panded— of  the  Revolution  of  1789! 
I  (a)  In  both  countries  do  we  find  at  work  the 
same  political  causes,  the  same  political  evolu- 
tion. The  reforms  of  Peter  the  Great  seem 
copied  from  the  administrative  reforms  of 
Louis  XIV,  with  Provincial  Governors  taking 
the  place  of  the  French  Intendants,  with  a  mock 
aristocracy,  only  on  court  parade  not  on  active 
duty.     We  find  the  same  arbitrary  autocracy, 


188  GREAT  RUSSIA 

the  same  absentee  landlords,  the  same  corrupt 
bureaucracy,  the  same  all-absorbing  .centraliza- 
tion killing  all  local  initiative. 

(b)  In  both  countries  we  are  struck  with  the 
same  sudden  paralysis  of  the  executive  power, 
the  same  wavering  and  divided  counsels,  the 
same  court  intrigues,  the  same  good  intentions, 
the  same  absence  of  a  man  strong  enough  to 
control  the  destructive  forces. 

(c)  In  both  countries  we  find  the  same  in- 
tellectual and  spiritual  antecedents,  and  just  as 
in  France  all  through  the  eighteenth  century, 
so  in  Russia  all  through  the  nineteenth,  the  po- 
litical revolution  has  been  preceded  and  partly 
caused  by  a  philosophical  revolution.  In  both 
countries  we  witness  a  shaking  of  religious  be- 
liefs by  the  leaders  of  thought,  a  criticism  of  all 
existing  institutions.  In  both  cases  we  are  con- 
fronted with  the  same  striking  contradiction  be- 
tween political  despotism  and  spiritual  anarchy, 
we  see  the  same  gathering  of  positive  and  nega- 
tive electricities,  bound  to  end  in  the  same  ex- 
plosion. Almost  every  epoch-making  writing 
of  Voltaire  and  Montesquieu,  of  Diderot  and 
Rousseau,  has  its  counterpart  in  Russian  litera- 
ture. For  Russian  literature  in  the  nineteenth 
century  is  not  a  purely  artistic  or  contemplative 


THE  REVOLUTION  189 

literature.  Each  masterpiece  has  its  political 
tendencies,  is  written  with  a  purpose.  Already, 
sixty  years  ago,  the  "Revizor"  of  Gogol  was 
a  blow  dealt  at  bureaucracy.  His  "Dead 
Souls,"  as  well  as  Turgenev's  "A  Sportsman's 
Sketches,"  are  an  attack  on  serfdom.  Turge- 
nev's novel,  "Fathers  and  Sons,"  is  an  analysis 
of  nihilism.  Dostoevsky's  "The  House  of 
the  Dead"  is  a  revelation  of  the  horrors  of 
Siberian  convict  life.  And  to  take  the  work 
of  the  two  men,  who  in  both  countries  have 
had  the  most  magnetic  influence — would  it 
be  possible  to  imagine  a  writer  more  like  Rous- 
seau than  Tolstoy?  No  doubt  Tolstoy  is  by 
far  the  more  consistent  thinker,  the  stronger 
personality,  the  nobler  character,  and  the  more 
creative  and  more  original  artist,  indeed  the 
most  original  artist  the  world  has  seen  since 
Shakespeare;  but  apart  from  these  personal 
characteristics,  the  work  of  the  two  men  presents 
the  most  extraordinary  similarity,  and  the  influ- 
ence of  the  one  on  the  other  is  obvious  and 
openly  admitted  by  Tolstoy  himself.  In  both 
we  find  the  same  extreme  doctrines  preached 
with  the  same  earnestness  and  passionateness, 
the  same  subjective  individualism,  the  same  un- 
expected   interpretation    of    Christianity,    the 


190  GREAT  RUSSIA 

same  Confession  of  Faith  of  the  Savoyard  Vi- 
car, the  same  attack  on  a  Temporal  Church  in 
the  name  of  an  Eternal  Gospel,  the  same  at- 
tacks on  society  and  civilization,  the  same  op- 
timism and  appeal  to  the  original  goodness  of 
man,  the  same  return  to  Nature,  to  the  Simple 
Life.  And  although  Tolstoy's  consistent  an- 
archism prevents  him  from  accepting  the  prin- 
ciples of  Rousseau's  Social  Contract,  these  prin- 
ciples have  found  universal  favour  with  the 
Russian  Revolutionists. 

And  both  in  France  and  in  Russia,  the  party 
of  revolution  seems  to  hold  the  field  unchal- 
lenged. Just  as  the  Gallican  Church  was  silent 
after  the  golden  age  of  Bossuet  and  Fenelon, 
even  so  the  Russian  Church  has  not  produced, 
in  the  hour  of  need,  one  single  great  thinker, 
one  single  statesman.  The  only  theological 
thinker  Russia  has  produced  in  the  nineteenth 
century,  Vladimir  Soloviov,  so  far  from  defend- 
ing the  Orthodox  Church,  preaches  the  reunion 
with  Roman  Catholicism. 

(d)  But  not  only  do  we  find  in  both  coun- 
tries the  same  intellectual  antecedents,  with  the 
same  humanitarian  creed,  with  the  same  radical 
uncompromising  spirit,  the  same  absence  of  the 
historical  sense,  the  same  belief  in  the  regenera- 


THE  REVOLUTION  191 

tion  of  mankind,  the  same  attitude  to  the 
Church  and  to  positive  Christianity,  so  different 
from  the  attitude  of  the  English  Puritan  and 
Scottish  Covenanters — but  in  Russia,  as  in 
France,  the  impulse  has  come  from  abroad.' 
The  Anglomania  of  the  French  thinkers  is 
paralleled  by  the  Cosmopolitanism  of  the  Rus- 
sian writers.  Whilst  Russian  imaginative 
literature  is  supremely  original,  political  litera- 
ture is  almost  entirely  borrowed  from  the  West. 
The  great  Slavophile  writers,  Samarine,  Aksa- 
kov,  Chomiakov,  Danilevski,  have  found  little 
hearing.  Even  Tolstoy  was  repudiated  since 
he  expressed  his  disbelief  in  Western  Parlia- 
mentary Institutions.  The  only  doctrines  that 
find  favour  are  imported  from  England,  France, 
and  especially  Germany.  The  present  political 
philosophy  in  Russia  is  an  olla  podrida,  a  dis- 
cordant pot  pourri  of  Spencer,  Buckle,  Rous- 
seau, Proudhon,  Feuerbach,  Marx,  and  Nietzs- 
che. The  destructive  thought  of  the  whole 
world  is  made  tributary  to  the  Russian  revolu- 
tion. 

(e)  In  both  countries  the  revolution  finds 
its  chief  supporters  in  the  upper  classes.  Mira- 
beau,  La  Rochefoucauld,  La  Fayette,  Lameth, 
Noailles,  the  Duke  of  Orleans,  have  found  their 


192  GREAT  RUSSIA 

successors  in  the  three  Princes  Troubetzkoy,  in 
Prince  Dolgoroukov,  in  Prince  Lvov,  in  Count 
Hey  den.  The  aristocracy  join  the  movement 
partly  from  dilettantism,  partly  from  generous 
convictions,  partly  from  ambition.  They  have 
been  ruined  by  luxury,  and  by  the  emancipa- 
tion of  the  serfs.  They  have  been  ousted  from 
high  places  by  the  bureaucracy.  They  would 
like  to  play  a  part  in  the  new  regime.  They 
hope  that  whilst  leading  the  revolutionary 
forces  they  may  be  able  to  control  them,  but 
being  generally  absentee  landlords  they  have 
lost  touch  with  the  people;  being  imbued  not 
with  the  national  spirit,  but  with  foreign  the- 
ories, they  have  forfeited  their  confidence. 

(/)  In  Russia  as  well  as  in  France  we  find 
the  same  financial  and  economic  distress,  the 
same  agrarian  fermentation.  In  both  countries 
the  peasantry  form  the  backbone  of  the  popu- 
lation, and  their  condition  is  lamentable.  We 
all  know  the  lurid  picture  in  La  Bruyere  of  the 
"wild  beasts  in  human  form."  We  have  all 
read  the  gloomy  accounts  of  Tolstoy,  and  the 
"power  of  darkness"  in  Russian  villages.  The 
peasant  in  1905  was  the  silent  pathetic  chorus 
in  the  tragedy,  at  first  keeping  in  the  back- 
ground whilst  aristocrats  and  journalists  fill  the 


THE  REVOLUTION  193 

foreground.  He  is  the  dumb  inarticulate  ac- 
tor whom  nobody  understands,  whom  hitherto 
everybody  has  neglected,  but  in  whose  name 
every  one  now  claims  to  speak,  whose  interests 
every  one  claims  to  defend,  because  all  feel  that 
on  him  depends  the  ultimate  success  or  failure 
of  the  revolution. 

(g)  In  both  countries  the  revolution  begins 
with  the  same  experiment  of  a  centralized  Par- 
liament superimposed  upon  a  centralized  bu- 
reaucracy, doomed  to  end  in  failure,  because  it 
is  without  any  root  in  the  past,  and  cannot  meet 
the  needs  of  the  people.  And  in  both  Parlia- 
ments we  hear  the  same  palaver,  the  same 
speeches,  earnest  yet  hollow,  sincere  yet  with 
the  ring  of  rhetoric.  In  those  long  speeches  of 
the  first  Duma  on  the  abolition  of  the  death 
penalty,  do  we  not  hear  some  echo  of  "Sea- 
green"  Robespierre,  who  resigned  his  position  as 
a  judge  because  he  could  not  muster  the  courage 
to  inflict  a  death  penalty,  and  who  yet  did  not 
hesitate  to  send  thousands  of  his  opponents  to 
the  guillotine,  and  to  wade  to  power  through 
those  same  "rivers  of  blood"  which  his  Russian 
imitators  are  prepared  to  cross ! 

(k)  And  do  we  not  see  the  same  strange 
contrast  between  the  tragic  magnitude  of  events, 


194  GREAT  RUSSIA 

the  immensity  of  the  scene,  and  the  mediocrity 
of  the  heroes  *?  Even  Michelet  confesses  to  this 
mediocrity  of  the  heroes  of  1792.  Speaking  of 
the  Club  des  Jacobins,  he  tells  us  "that  collec- 
tive action  was  far  more  powerful  there  than 
individual  action,  that  the  strongest,  the  most 
heroic  individual,  lost  his  advantages.  In  such 
associations,  active  mediocrity  rises  to  impor- 
tance, genius  weighs  very  little."  *  Mirabeau 
is  left  without  a  successor,  and  even  in  his  life- 
time it  is  now  historically  proven  that  his  real 
influence  was  very  limited,  and  that  his  fiery 
speeches  seldom  turned  the  votes  of  the  Con- 
stituent Assembly.  Even  so  in  Russia.  The 
scene  extends  from  the  Baltic  to  the  Pacific 
Ocean.  The  issues  at  stake  are  tremendous. 
And  yet  the  chief  actors  are  ordinary  human 
beings  like  ourselves,  honest  and  inconsistent, 
clever  and  weak,  themselves  led  by  events  in- 
stead of  being  born  leaders  and  rulers  of  men. 
We  are  still  waiting  for  the  one  great  Russian 
statesman  to  appear. 

(1)  And  finally,  both  revolutions  were 
greeted  by  the  unanimous  applause  of  a  sympa- 
thetic world.  At  the  beginning  of  the  French 
Revolution,  not  only  poets  like  Wordsworth 

♦Michelet,  "Revolution  Franchise,"  II,  75,  76. 


THE  REVOLUTION  195 

and  Schiller,  philosophers  like  Kant  and  Fichte, 
even  practical  statesmen  hail  the  event  as  the 
beginning  of  a  new  era.  The  leader  of  the 
Liberal  Party,  Fox,  indulges  in  the  same  decla- 
rations as  his  successor,  Sir  Henry  Campbell- 
Bannerman.  But  in  both  cases  the  sympathy  is 
equally  hollow,  because  based  on  a  complete 
ignorance  of  the  real  state  of  affairs.  Very 
few  Englishmen  then  knew  the  situation  in 
France.  And  there  were  not  in  1905  in  Great 
Britain  six  publicists  who  had  taken  the  trou- 
ble to  study  the  Russian  language  and  litera- 
ture, who  were  able  to  read  Russian  news- 
papers, and  who  were  able  to  investigate  the  sit- 
uation at  first  hand.  And  therefore  it  hap- 
pened in  1905  that,  just  as  in  1792,  sympathy 
speedily  evaporated,  and  was  followed  by  an 
equally  unjustifiable  outburst  of  hatred  and 
contempt  when  these  poor  misguided  "Tartars 
and  barbarians"  proved  themselves  unworthy 
of  and  unprepared  for  liberty,  and  happened  to 
deceive  the  expectations  of  an  enthusiastic 
world. 

Few  readers  will  be  inclined  to  deny  that 
the  resemblances  just  indicated  are  most  strik- 
ing and  most  unexpected.  And  yet  we  have 
not  altered  the  facts,  we  have  not  strained  them, 


196  GREAT  RUSSIA 

we  have  not  even  arranged  them.  Compared 
with  its  predecessor,  the  Russian  Revolution  of 
1905  seems  like  one  of  those  French  plays  which 
a  resourceful  stage  manager  adapts  to  the  Rus- 
sian stage.  The  names  and  places,  the  dresses 
and  local  colouring  are  alone  changed.  The 
characters  are  identical,  and  the  plot  is  hurry- 
ing through  the  same  thrilling  episodes  to  the 
same  denouement.  It  seems  as  if  we  might 
accuse  the  Muse  of  History  of  plagiarizing  her- 
self, as  if  Fate  had  exhausted  her  possibilities, 
or  as  if  she  wanted  to  teach  us  the  great  moral 
lesson  that  mankind,  untaught  by  the  sufferings 
and  the  catastrophes  of  previous  generations, 
shall  be  ever  doomed  to  repeat  the  same  blun- 
ders and  the  same  crimes. 

II.  The  Differences 

Would  it  then  be  true  that  the  Slav  people,  so 
powerful  in  their  literature  and  in  their  imagi- 
native art,  so  original  in  their  temperament,  as 
soon  as  they  apply  themselves  to  political  action 
are  only  capable  of  fitful  impulses,  and  unable 
to  strike  out  a  path  of  their  own?  Would  it 
be  true  that  180,000,000  of  Russia  people  are 
only  to  be  like  puppets  in  the  hands  of  a  few 
thousand  bureaucrats  or  a  few  hundred  agita- 


THE  REVOLUTION  197 

tors,  who  pull  the  wires,  think  out  the  plot  and 
apportion  the  parts'?  And  will  the  Russian 
people  be  doomed  in  a  national  emergency  to 
borrow  once  more  their  reforms,  their  institu- 
tions, their  whole  machinery  from  their  West- 
ern neighbours'? 

To  this  we  might  reply  in  the  first  place  that 
the  analogies  we  have  noticed  may  be  easily 
explained  by  the  fact  that  the  two  nations  pos- 
sessed the  same  political  organization — a  com- 
bination of  autocracy  and  centralized  bureau- 
cracy, that  both  nations  have  been  largely 
agricultural,  and  that  the  intellectual  classes 
have  been  imbued  by  the  same  principles. 
They  may,  perhaps,  be  further  explained  by 
some  resemblances  between  the  Slav  tempera- 
ment and  the  Celtic  temperament,  a  certain  im- 
pulsivness,  an  absence  of  self-control,  and  a 
predominance  of  the  emotional  qualities. 

In  the  second  place  we  might  reply  that, 
striking  though  the  analogies  may  appear,  they 
are  not  fundamental,  and  do  not  justify  us  in 
drawing  out  any  inferences  for  the  future.  So 
far,  in  Russia  we  have  only  seen  the  prelimi- 
nary, the  destructive  period.  Now,  destruc- 
tion is  the  same  in  all  times  and  in  all  places. 
A  building  is  pulled  down  very  much  in  the 


198  GREAT  RUSSIA 

same  way  in  every  country.  Blasting  and 
blowing  up  are  universal  processes,  dynamite  is 
cosmopolitan;  it  is  only  when  a  building  rises 
above  ground  that  the  characteristics  of  national 
architecture  begin  to  appear. 

And,  therefore,  it  is  only  when  we  begin  to 
think  of  the  possibilities  of  a  constructive  revo- 
lution in  Russia  that  differences  arise  which 
are  far  more  important  than  any  analogies  and 
which  must  entirely  change  our  forecast  of 
events. 

(a)  The  Russian  autocracy  have  not  lost 
their  prestige  in  the  eyes  of  the  peasantry. 
Whilst  in  France  the  peasants,  oppressed  and 
exploited  by  the  Crown  and  the  Church  and  the 
absentee  landlords,  joined  the  ranks  of  the  rev- 
olutionists in  almost  every  province  except  Brit- 
tany and  the  Vendee,  in  Russia  the  peasantry 
seem  to  have  remained  loyal  to  the  existing 
regime.  Now,  if  this  fact  be  true,  it  is  deci- 
sive— for  the  peasantry  still  form  85  per  cent. 
of  the  population,  and  whatever  preliminary 
success  might  be  achieved  by  the  revolutionists, 
the  ultimate  success  would  depend  on  the  sup- 
port of  the  moujik. 

I  have  just  stated  that  the  peasantry  seem  to 
be  loyal,  for  it  is  almost  impossible  to  know  the 


THE  REVOLUTION  199 

facts  with  absolute  certainty :  in  the  first  place, 
because  the  peasants  have  not  the  same  means 
of  expressing  their  feelings  as  the  intellectual 
classes;  in  the  second  place,  because  for  any 
information  we  possess  we  almost  exclusively 
depend  on  the  revolutionists  themselves  who 
control  the  European  Press,  and  with  whom  the 
wish  is  father  both  to  the  thought  and  to  the 
deed.  We,  therefore,  can  only  judge  from  in- 
ference and  arrive  at  probabilities. 

But  in  support  of  the  probable  loyalty  of  the 
moujik  I  would  submit  the  following  important 
considerations : 

( 1 )  Loyalty  has  been  for  generations  a  reli- 
gious tradition,  and  almost  an  instinct  with  the 
Russian  peasantry,  and  such  instincts  have  a 
very  tough  life  in  them,  especially  in  a  slow, 
patient,  passive  being  like  the  moujik.  After 
the  disaster  to  the  Russian  fleet  in  1905,  I  vis- 
ited many  villages  in  every  part  of  the  Em- 
pire. The  image  of  the  Tsar  was  still  hang- 
ing in  every  izba  with  the  icons  of  the  saints. 
The  peasants  remember  the  broad  fact  that 
Tsardom  has  ever  been  on  their  side,  and  that 
whilst  they  owe  their  servitude  and  the  krie- 
postnoe  pravo  to  the  aristocracy,  they  are  in- 
debted for  their  freedom  to  the  Tsar  liberator 


200  GREAT  RUSSIA 

(osvoboditel).  There  exists  a  popular  prov- 
erb: do  Boga  visoko,  do  Tsaria  dalzoko!  God 
is  too  high :  The  Tsar  is  too  far !  This  proverb 
indicates  the  deep-seated  belief  of  the  peasant 
that  if  it  were  only  possible  to  let  the  Tsar 
know  his  wishes  and  his  wants  relief  would  be 
soon  at  hand. 

(2)  The  peasantry  do  not  want  a  central 
Parliament,  they  are  not  susceptible  to  political 
metaphysics  nor  to  "immortal  principles"  which 
would  carry  the  French  off  their  feet.  If  they 
have  any  desire  for  political  liberty,  it  only  ex- 
tends to  the  management  of  their  own  affairs  in 
their  village  communities  and  in  the  County 
Councils  or  Zemstvos,  a  measure  of  political 
liberty  which,  however  imperfect,  they  already 
possess.  But  what  the  peasant  wants  above  all 
is  more  land;  he  is  clamouring  for  a  drastic 
agrarian  reform".  Let  the  Tsar  initiate  such  a 
reform,  let  him  satisfy  that  craving,  that  hun- 
ger, let  him  offer  his  people  a  comprehensive 
scheme  of  land  reform,  and  the  peasant  would 
rather  receive  his  additional  plot  of  land  at 
the  hands  of  the  Tsar  than  at  the  hands  of  the 
aristocracy,  whom  he  suspects,  or  of  the  "intel- 
lectuals," whose  language  he  does  not  under- 
stand, or  of  the  Jews,  whom  he  abhors. 


THE  REVOLUTION  201 

(3)  So  far,  the  peasants  have  given  no  un- 
mistakable indication  that  their  loyalty  is 
shaken.  No  doubt  the  war  has  left  a  very  deep 
impression,  and  I  have  myself  witnessed  in 
many  parts  of  Russia  heartrending  scenes.  In 
1905  I  saw  thousands  of  families  bidding  fare- 
well to  young  soldiers  leaving  for  the  Far  East. 
But  these  disasters  in  the  Far  East  have  not  been 
brought  home  to  the  Tsar  himself.  Such  spo- 
radic outbursts  of  discontent  as  have  occurred 
in  the  army  can  be  traced  to  the  work  of  agi- 
tators, and  have  only  affected  those  soldiers  who 
have  been  bred  or  who  have  lived  in  large  towns, 
and  who  therefore  were  already  disloyal.  Such 
agrarian  riots  as  have  taken  place  can  be  ex- 
plained by  the  prevailing  anarchy  and  by  the 
temporary  withdrawing  of  the  strong  hand  of 
government.  Such  popular  insurrections  and 
wholesale  massacres  as  have  occurred  have  been 
directed  not  against  the  representatives  of  gov- 
ernment, but  against  the  Jews  suspected  of  fo- 
menting the  revolution.  I  do  not  wish  to  enter 
into  the  very  complicated  question  of  settling 
the  responsibility  of  these  massacres;  but  the 
very  fact  of  the  accusation  that  the  "black  hun- 
dreds," the  "tchornia  sotnia,"  alone  are  made 
responsible,  and  that  they  have  been  able  to 


202  GREAT  RUSSIA 

organize  massacres  against  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands, nay,  millions  of  Jews — that  fact  is  suffi- 
cient to  prove  how  easy  it  would  be  to  turn  the 
popular  passions  against  the  revolutionists. 
Indeed,  if  the  revolutionary  spirit  were  spread- 
ing, and  if  famine  were  to  be  the  result  of  an- 
archy, nothing  would  be  easier  than  to  make  the 
peasants  believe  that  it  is  the  Jews  and  the 
landowners  who  are  responsible  for  the  evil, 
and  that  it  is  they  who  interfered  with  the  good 
intentions  of  the  Tsar:  in  which  case  there 
would  not  be  one  peasant  insurrection  like  the 
Vendee,  but  twenty  sporadic  outbursts  all  over 
the  Empire.* 

(b)  In  1789,  the  French  Church — with  its 
Court  Abbes,  with  its  Rohans  and  its  Talley- 
rands — was  utterly  discredited.  In  Russia  the 
Church  seems  to  have  retained  its  hold  over  the 
peasantry.  The  Russian  people  are,  as  I  have 
shown,  the  most  religious  nation  in  the  world, 
as  one  would  expect  from  people  on  whom  life 
has  always  pressed  hard,  and  who  must  seek  in 
their  beliefs  an  opiate  against  their  sufferings. 
Even  irreligion  in  Russia  retains  all  the  earnest- 

♦This  forecast  has  been  only  too  fully  verified  in  the 
epidemic  of  pogroms  which  are  a  blot  on  the  Russian  name 
and  which  continues  unabated  during  the  present  war. 


THE  REVOLUTION  203 

ness,  all  the  single-hearted  devotion,  all  the 
mysticism,  of  a  belief  in  the  supernatural.  Sig- 
nificantly enough,  amongst  the  four  classic  nov- 
elists, three — Gogol,  Dostoevsky,  and  Tolstoy 
— have  ultimately  been  converted  from  scepti- 
cism and  atheism  to  Christianity,  and  the  fourth 
— Turgenev — only  continued  to  adhere  to  posi- 
tivism because  he  continued  to  live  an  exile  in 
Germany  and  France.  The  only  great  philo- 
sophical thinker  Russia  has  produced — Vladi- 
mir Soloviov — may  be  properly  called  a  Chris- 
tian Plato,  and  it  is  equally  significant  that  the 
revolutionary  leader  who  hitherto  has  had  the 
strongest  influence  over  the  masses  has  been  a 
priest.  I  am  therefore  not  inclined  to  admit 
with  the  extreme  Radicals,  that  the  Church  has 
ceased  to  be  a  national-  force.  I  have  had  my- 
self opportunities  of  observing  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  Russian  pilgrims  at  Jerusalem  and  at 
the  great  national  shrines  of  Kieff  and  of  Mos- 
cow, and  in  no  other  country  have  I  met  with 
such  simple,  pathetic,  unwavering  faith. 

The  loyalty  to  the  Church  is  all  the  more 
amazing  because  the  Church,  as  a  body,  has 
done  little  to  deserve  it.  From  my  own  ob- 
servation in  many  Slav  countries,  in  Bulgaria, 
in  Serbia,  as  well  as  in  Russia,  the  Orthodox 


204  GREAT  RUSSIA 

Church  is  at  present  in  a  more  degraded  state 
than  any  other  Christian  Church.  The  hier- 
archy are  ignorant,  contemplative  monks.  The 
secular  priesthood  form  a  miserable  caste,  al- 
most as  uneducated  as  the  peasants  whom  they 
are  supposed  to  guide  and  to  enlighten.  All 
through  the  nineteenth  century  the  intellec- 
tuals, with  the  exception  of  a  few  writers  of 
the  Slavophile  group,  have  been  on  the  side  of 
the  opposition,  as  I  pointed  out  before.  The 
Russian  Church  has  not  produced  one  theolo- 
gian, one  writer,  one  statesman. 

Rut  when  we  consider  that  the  Church,  not- 
withstanding her  present  degradation,  has 
nevertheless  not  forfeited  the  confidence  of  the 
peasantry,  it  seems  all  the  more  reasonable  to 
infer  that  her  influence  would  be  tremendous  if 
she  were  to  awaken  from  her  present  lethargy, 
if  there  were  a  revival  of  spiritual  energy.  And 
it  seems  equally  reasonable  to  anticipate  that 
such  influence  would  be  exerted  on  the  side  of 
the  Government. 

The  Church  might,  no  doubt,  have  a  liberal- 
izing tendency,  she  might  insist  on  the  carrying 
out  of  a  programme  of  reform,  she  might  act 
the  part  of  umpire  and  peacemaker — but  her 
influence  would  be  on  the  whole  a  conservative 


THE  REVOLUTION  205 

one — as  she  herself  would  have  to  dread  as 
much  as  the  Government  from  the  party  of 
revolution. 

I  am  convinced  that  the  revolution  is  strong 
only  because  the  Church  is  weak,  and  that  the 
Church  is  weak  only  because  she  has  been  de- 
graded into  a  Government  department.  Let 
the  Government  realize  that  there  must  be  an 
independent  constructive  spiritual  power  to 
keep  in  check  the  destructive  intellectual  forces. 
Let  the  Government  realize  that  it  is  its  own 
interest  to  emancipate  that  spiritual  power — 
and  it  seems  probable  that  a  regenerative  Rus- 
sian Church  will  rally  round  the  Government 
and  use  all  her  increased  influence  to  secure  the 
loyalty  of  the  people. 

(c)  The  French  Revolution,  like  the  Eng- 
lish Revolution,  was  essentially  a  middle-class 
revolution.  Qu'est-ce  que  le  Tiers  Etat? 
Rien.  Que  doit-il  etre*?  Tout.  Without  a 
strong  middle  class,  there  can  be  no  public  opin- 
ion, and  without  the  constant  and  jealous  con- 
trol of  public  opinion,  there  can  be  no  success- 
ful liberal  regime. 

Now  in  Russia,  no  such  middle  class  as  yet 
exists.  Russia  is  still  an  undifferentiated  peas- 
ant State — without  either  bourgeoisie  or  aris- 


206  GREAT  RUSSIA 

tocracy.  Trade  and  industry  are  largely  in  the 
hands  of  Jews  and  foreigners,  Germans,  Bel- 
gians, and  Armenians.  The  only  educated 
class  are  the  bureaucracy,  and  that  fact  partly 
explains  why  the  bureaucracy,  notwithstanding 
its  corruption,  continues  to  possess  such  powers. 
And  it  will  retain  such  power  as  long  as  there 
is  no  other  educated  class  to  take  its  place. 

So  far,  the  revolution  has  been  mainly  an 
intellectual  movement.  It  has  proceeded  not 
from  the  Third  Estate,  but  from  what  Carlyle 
has  called  the  "Fourth  Estate."  The  revolu- 
tion is  really  managed  by  a  mere  band  of  intel- 
lectuals, journalists,  professors,  advocates,  and 
students.  It  depends  for  its  moral  support  on 
public  opinion  in  Europe,  and  for  its  material 
support  on  the  army  of  industrial  labourers  in 
the  large  cities.""  Nothing  is  more  interesting  to 
the  foreigner  than  to  observe  the  extraordinary 
power  wielded  by  these  few  thousands  of  "in- 
tellectuals" and  young  students,  and  nothing  is 
more  significant  to  an  Englishman  than  the  fact 
that  whilst  in  Great  Britain  the  universities  are 
wholly  conservative,  in  Russia  they  are  wholly 
revolutionary. 

(d)  The  French  Revolution  was  a  national 
movement.     The  Russian  Revolution,  besides 


THE  REVOLUTION  207 

being  an  intellectual  movement,  is  also  a 
nationalist  movement.  In  other  words  the 
French  nation,  although  distracted  by  civil  dis- 
sensions, was  a  homogeneous  unit,  and  it  is  this 
unity  which  made  the  revolution  invincible. 
So  much  was  this  homogeneity  the  characteristic 
of  France  that  it  was  one  of  the  chief  accusa- 
tions against  the  Girondists  that  they  were 
"federalists."  The  revolutionary  wars  were 
made  in  the  name  of  the  "Republic  one  and  in- 
divisible." 

Russia,  on  the  contrary,  is  a  huge  heterogene- 
ous mass,  composed  of  irreconcilable  elements. 
The  centrifugal  forces  in  a  revolutionary  crisis 
must  always  be  stronger  than  the  centripetal. 
And  the  aim  of  the  Russian  Revolution  is  not 
like  the  aim  of  the  French,  "La  Republique  une 
et  indivisible"  but  the  division  and  dissolution 
of  the  Empire.  The  different  nationalist  ele- 
ments may  combine  for  that  end — nationl  sep- 
aration— an  end  perfectly  legitimate  from  their 
point  of  view — but  their  interests  and  tendency 
are  different,  nay,  contradictory.  Once  separa- 
tion granted,  there  is  great  danger  that  the 
Catholic  Pole  may  turn  against  the  Polish  Jew, 
the  Tatar  against  the  Armenian. 

(e)  The  conjunction  of  events  in  1789  and 


208  GREAT  RUSSIA 

in  1906  is  fundamentally  different.  It  is  this 
conjunction  which  made  the  movement  in 
France  so  irresistible.  Even  at  the  eleventh 
hour  the  revolution  in  France  might  have  been 
avoided.  What  made  it  inevitable  was  not  any 
pre-existing  "logic  of  events,"  but  a  combina- 
tion of  untoward  circumstances:  the  religious 
war  and  the  schism  stirred  up  by  a  non-juring 
clergy,  the  class  war  stirred  up  by  the  aris- 
tocracy, the  European  war  stirred  up  by  the 
emigres.  Had  there  been  neither  religious 
schism,  nor  class  war,  nor  European  interven- 
tion— it  is  highly  probable  that  a  Reign  of 
Terror  would  never  have  set  in.  Once  this 
"conjunction"  of  events  took  place,  terror  was 
unavoidable,  and  what  is  even  more  important, 
as  Taine  himself,  the  most  penetrating  critic 
of  the  French  Revolution,  is  compelled  to  ad- 
mit, France  could  only  be  saved  by  a  Reign  of 
Terror. 

Now,  in  Russia,  the  situation,  the  "conjunc- 
tion" of  events,  is  absolutely  different. 

In  the  first  place  there  can  be  no  religious 
schism,  and  therefore  no  religious  war,  which  in 
France  involved  a  life-and-death  struggle,  a 
war  waged  with  all  the  fanaticism  and  horror 
of  a  crusade.     In  Russia  the  Church  is  a  State 


THE  REVOLUTION  209 

department,  not  as  in  France,  a  state  within  the 
State :  imperium  in  imperio.  No  religious  pas- 
sions will  be  stirred,  for  the  hatred  against  the 
Jew  is  economic  and  racial,  not  religious. 

In  the  second  place,  there  can  be  no  class 
war,  for  the  simple  reason  that  in  Russia  the 
aristocracy  as  a  class  has  ceased  to  exist.  A  few 
noble  families  who  have  given  up  the  principle 
of  primogeniture,  three  hundred  princes  Obo- 
lenski,  four  hundred  princes  Troubetzkoy,  five 
hundred  princes  Galitzin,  most  of  whom  are 
poor  and  have  lost  their  landed  property,  do  not 
form  an  Estate  of  the  Empire. 

And  finally,  there  cannot  be  in  Russia  any 
foreign  intervention.  No  doubt  the  Russian 
Revolution  has  its  emigres,  its  exiles,  mostly 
journalists  and  Jews  or  Poles,  who  are  stirring 
up  European  opinion  against  the  Russian  Gov- 
ernment. But  Europe  will  interfere  neither 
for  nor  against  the  revolution.  British  states- 
men may  have  expressed  in  1905  their  Platonic 
sympathies  for  the  dissolved  Duma.  English 
newspapers  may  collect  subscriptions  or  send 
the  "moral"  support  of  the  British  intellectuals 
to  their  brethren  in  Russia.  But  no  democratic 
Burke  will  arise  to  preach  the  crusade  of  nations 
against  kings,  as  Burke  once  arose  to  preach  the 


210  GREAT  RUSSIA 

crusade  of  kings  against  nations.  The  day  of 
Holy  Alliances  has  gone.  The  day  of  the  soli- 
darity and  fraternity  of  nations  is  only  just 
dawning.  Russia,  unlike  France,  must  be  left 
to  work  out  her  own  doom  or  her  own  salva- 
tion. 

Ill 

There  now  only  remains  for  us  to  sum  up  the 
chief  conclusions  to  be  drawn  from  a  compari- 
son between  the  situation  in  France  in  1789 
and  the  situation  in  Russia  to-day.  Not  that  I 
entertain  much  hope  that  those  chiefly  inter- 
ested will  give  much  heed  to  those  lessons  of 
history.  Alas !  in  times  of  revolution,  men  are 
driven  on  by  their  prejudices  and  their  passions, 
they  are  seldom  guided  by  the  light  of  reason 
or  the  teachings  of  experience.  But  this  fact 
does  not  make  it  the  less  imperative  for  any  one 
wielding  a  pen  in  Russia  or  elsewhere  to  pro- 
claim such  lessons,  and  to  point  out  the  only 
way  to  political  and  social  salvation. 

( 1 )  The  first  and  the  most  important  lesson 
is  this :  the  situations  in  the  two  cases  are  so  fun- 
damentally different,  that  no  considerations  as 
to  the  inevitableness  of  the  one  revolution  per- 
mits us  to  draw  an  inference  as  to  the  inevitable- 


THE  REVOLUTION  211 

ness  of  tne  other.  Even  if  it  were  assumed  that 
the  forces  let  loose  by  the  French  Revolution 
were  beyond  human  control,  the  same  could  not 
be  asserted  of  the  Russian  Revolution.  The 
revolutionary  forces  are,  no  doubt,  strong,  but 
the  Conservative  forces  are  also  formidable.  It 
is  not  true  that  the  less  resistance  is  offered  to 
the  energies  of  destruction,  the  less  bloody  the 
revolution  will  be.  It  is  not  true  that  it  is  too 
late  to  prevent  a  catastrophe.  No  doubt  it  is 
so  much  easier  to  surrender  one's  will  to  the  so- 
called  "logic  of  events,"  to  let  the  storm  rage 
and  pass,  to  "emigrate"  like  the  French  aris- 
tocracy, and  to  fly  before  danger,  and  if  the 
catastrophe  does  break  out,  to  make  one  man  or 
one  class  the  scapegoat  of  the  national  sins. 
But  what  we  call  fatality  in  such  cases  is  noth- 
ing but  the  fatality  of  our  own  folly  and  of  our 
own  cowardice. 

What  made  the  Reign  of  Terror  inevitable 
in  France  was  not  any  mysterious  "logic  of 
events,"  but  the  criminal  interference  of  Euro- 
pean Governments,  who  assumed  that  the  pros- 
trate and  bankrupt  condition  of  France,  dis- 
tracted by  a  religious  war  and  a  civil  war,  gave 
them  a  splendid  opportunity  of  invading  the 
country  and  dictating  their  own  terms.     Russia 


1 


212  GREAT  RUSSIA 

has  nothing  to  dread  from  her  neighbours.  So 
far  the  revolutionary  movement  has  been  noth- 
ing but  a  deliberate  attempt  on  the  part  of  a 
small  minority  to  overturn  the  existing  form 
of  government,  and  to  impose  their  own  re- 
forms by  their  own  methods.  But  in  that  po- 
litical duel,  both  parties  retain  the  complete 
control  and  the  full  responsibility  of  events. 
If  to-morrow  the  opposition  chose  to  give  up 
their  systematic  opposition  to  all  government 
proposals,  and  if,  on  the  other  hand,  the  gov- 
ernment gave  unmistakable  proofs  that  they  are 
resolved  to  carry  out  a  far-reaching  programme 
of  political  and  social  reform — the  present  an- 
archy would  cease  at  once,  and  a  constructive 
revolution  would  at  once  be  possible. 

It  is  only  if  both  the  opposition  and  the  gov- 
ernment prove  unequal  to  the  great  crisis,  if 
they  both  refuse  to  come  to  terms — then,  but 
only  then,  the  fatal  logic  of  events  will  begin 
to  unfold  its  consequences :  but  fatality  will  not 
have  been  in  the  events  themselves,  but  in  the 
weakness  and  stupidity  of  a  government  incapa- 
ble of  steering  the  country  through  the  tempest, 
and  in  the  folly  of  an  opposition  which  sacri- 
ficed the  welfare  of  their  country  to  their  meta- 


THE  REVOLUTION  213 

physical  theories,  and  to  their  personal  feelings 
of  hatred  and  revenge. 

(2)  The  second  conclusion  which  forces  it- 
self upon  us  is,  that  Russia  cannot  be  saved 
mainly  by  a  centralized  parliament  superim-" 
posed  upon  a  centralized  bureaucracy.  If  a 
centralized  parliamentary  regime  without  any 
root  or  support  in  local  self-government  was 
premature  in  France  and  doomed  to  failure, 
how  much  more  certain  must  such  failure  be 
in  Russia!  Russia  does  not  possess  as  yet, 
though  she  may  acquire  in  future,  one  of  the  es- 
sential conditions  which  make  a  parliamentary 
government  of  the  approved  British  pattern 
possible.  She  has  no  independent  aristocracy 
rooted  in  the  soil,  no  independent  Church, 
no  middle  class,  no  independent  judicature. 
There  is  no  united  nation  behind  the  parlia- 
ment, there  is  no  organized  body  of  public 
opinion  to  check  and  control  it,  there  are  no  free  9 
institutions  to  support  it.  It  hangs  in  the  air. 
No  eloquent  speeches  can  alter  that  funda- 
mental fact. 

(3)  If  there  is  one  other  lesson  which  the 
French  Revolution  teaches  with  irresistible  per- 
suasiveness, it  is  this :  that  a  country  confronted 


214  GREAT  RUSSIA 

with  the  tremendous  tasks  of  economic,  politi- 
cal, social,  and  religious  reorganization,  ex- 
hausted by  a  colossal  foreign  war,  and  threat- 
ened by  a  no  less  ominous  civil  war,  can  only  be 
saved  by  a  strong  government  and  a  liberal  des- 
potism. No  doubt,  the  tasks  before  Russia  are 
very  different  from  those  which  France  had  to 
solve,  but  they  are  even  more  Titanic.  A 
sweeping  measure  of  agrarian  reform,  and  per- 
haps of  land-nationalization,  the  regeneration 
of  the  peasantry,  the  regeneration  of  the  Church, 
the  establishment  of  decentralization  and  of 
local  government,  the  granting  of  autonomy  to 
Poland,  the  solution  of  the  racial  problems — 
and  especially  of  the  Jewish  problem  and  of  the 
Armenian  problem — these  are  some  of  the  tasks 
before  the  Russian  Government  of  to-morrow. 
No  government  but  one  invested  with  plenary 
powers  could  ever  attempt  to  grapple  with  such 
Herculean  labours. 

(4)  Such  a  strong  government  could  not  be 
formed,  as  in  France,  with  purely  revolutionary 
elements.  Even  a  Reign  of  Terror  could  not 
evolve  it,  and  the  above-quoted  dictum  of 
Joseph  de  Maistre  does  not  apply  to  Russia. 
The  materials  of  a  strong  government  do  not 
exist  in  the  revolutionary  party,  nor  the  possi- 


THE  REVOLUTION  215 

bility  of  a  strong  policy,  as  the  several  sections 
of  the  party  are  divided,  not  on  questions  of 
principle,  which  might  be  compromised,  but  on 
differences  of  race  and  nationality,  which  will 
ever  be  conflicting.  Unity  of  action  seems  im- 
possible on  any  constructive  programme.  No 
single  section  of  the  revolutionary  party  could 
secure  the  support  of  the  others,  nor  would  it 
have  sufficient  power  to  absorb  or  control  them. 
(5)  A  strong  administration  can  therefore  be 
only  established  if  all  the  moderate  and  liberal 
elements  of  the  people  loyally  rally  round  the 
present  government  and  if  that  government 
boldly  initiates  and  consistently  pursues  a  com- 
prehensive programme  of  constructive  reform) 
It  is  absurd  to  object  that  Tsardom  and  Bu- 
reaucracy once  they  had  regained  their  strength 
would  at  once  abuse  it  and  would  again  start 
on  a  course  of  reaction.  The  recent  history  of 
Russia  abundantly  shows  that  such  liberal 
despotism  is  possible  in  Russia.  Forty  years 
ago,  Alexander  II  successfully  carried  through 
a  succession  of  political,  economic,  and  social 
reforms,  the  most  gigantic  perhaps  that  have 
ever  been  accomplished  by  one  man.  Is  facie t 
cut  prodest.  Even  if  it  had  the  power,  autoc- 
racy henceforth  has  no  interest  to  revert  to  its 


216  GREAT  RUSSIA 

old  ways.  Neither  the  Tsar  nor  his  advisers 
would  again  place  themselves  willingly  in  their 
unenviable  position  of  1905.  The  days  of  re- 
action are  past,  provided  the  Liberals  play  their 
cards  well.  The  danger  seems  to  me  hence- 
forth to  lie  almost  as  much  in  the  direction  of 
anarchy  as  in  the  direction  of  reaction.  Autoc- 
racy would  only  try  a  return  to  the  past,  if  all 
other  issues  were  closed.  But  in  that  case,  it 
would  probably  be  the  opposition  by  their  un- 
compromising, purely  negative,  and  destructive 
policy  that  would  make  the  Terreur  blanche  a 
necessity  and  a  liberal  despotism  an  impossibil- 
ity. It  seems  to  me,  therefore,  that  the  obvious 
duty  of  every  Liberal  in  Russia  at  the  present 
critical  juncture,  and  the  only  chance  for  a  Lib- 
eral solution,  lies  in  a  loyal  adhesion  to,  and 
co-operation  with,  the  government.  If  neither 
the  autocracy  nor  the  opposition  rose  to  a  sense 
of  the  urgency  of  the  danger,  and  to  the  im- 
mensity of  the  task  to  be  accomplished,  there 
then  would  only  remain  one  alternative  and  one 
certainty :  the  infernal  circles  of  anarchy  and  of 
red  terrorism:  facilis  descensus  Avernil  Di  hoc 
omen  avertant. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

RUSSIAN  POLITICAL  EVILS 
AND  THEIR  REMEDIES 

FANATICS,  extremists,  political  meta- 
physicians and  doctrinaires  of  all  sects 
may  try  to  obscure  the  Russian  issues. 
But  the  issues  are  perfectly  clear,  and  the  prin- 
ciples themselves  are  amazingly  simple,  al- 
though their  patient  and  consistent  practice  may 
tax  all  the  resources  of  statesmanship.  Both 
the  evils  from  which  the  Russian  body  politic 
has  suffered  in  the  past,  and  the  remedies  which 
will  cure  the  evils  are  equally  obvious  to  a  dis- 
passionate student  of  politics. 

The  evil  is  a  false  philosophy  of  Imperial- 
ism. The  remedy  is  the  new  political  philoso- 
phy of  federation. 

The  evil  is  a  tortuous  Russian  statecraft 
based  on  intrigue  and  dissension,  a  policy  in- 
herited from  Frederick  the  Great.  The  remedy 
is  a  wise  and  straightforward  statesmanship. 

The  evil  is  a  mystical  belief  in  an  unnatural 
political  unity,  in  an  artificial  uniformity.  The 
remedy  is  the  recognition  of  the  complex  va- 
217 


218  GREAT  RUSSIA 

riety  of  national  characteristics,  of  the  rich  di- 
versity of  history. 

The  evil  is  a  Byzantine  immobility,  a  dread 
of  all  fresh  revelations  of  life.  The  remedy  is 
a  belief  in  movement,  in  political  experiment, 
even  though  the  experiment  may  be  attended 
with  risk. 

The  evil  is  a  belief  in  State  interference,  in 
the  magic  of  regulations,  in  paternalism  and 
protection.  The  remedy  is  a  belief  in  indi- 
vidual initiative  and  in  individual  responsi- 
bility. 

The  evil  is  a  monstrous  centralization  im- 
posed upon  a  heterogeneous  conglomerate  of 
one  hundred  and  eighty  million  human  beings. 
The  remedy  is  systematic  decentralization  and 
Home  Rule. 

The  evil  is  the  inevitable  corruption  of  an 
arbitrary  bureaucracy.  The  remedy  is  the  pub- 
licity of  the  Press  denouncing  abuses  wherever 
they  occur. 

The  evil  is  an  exclusive  nationalism  dis- 
guised under  the  name  of  patriotism.  The 
remedy  is  equal  rights  to  all  nationalities. 

The  evil  is  race  fanaticism  and  race  antago- 
nism. The  remedy  is  race  co-operation  and 
race  harmony. 


RUSSIAN  POLITICAL  EVILS     219 

The  evil  is  a  narrow  and  shallow  policy  of 
obscurantism,  sinning  against  the  Holy  Spirit. 

The  evil  is  the  keeping  of  the  people  in  igno- 
rance. The  remedy  is  the  spread  of  popular 
education,  the  diffusion  of  sweetness  and  light. 

But  greatest  of  all  political  evils  in  the  Rus- 
sian Empire  has  been  the  insensate  dream  of  re- 
ligious unity,  imposed  by  authority,  the  pagan 
confusion  of  spiritual  and  temporal  power. 
The  remedy  is  the  separation  of  Church  and 
State,  equal  rights  to  all  the  Churches,  the  re- 
leasing of  the  tremendous  spiritual  forces  latent 
in  the  Russian  people. 

The  Slavophiles  are  ever  opposing  their  three 
mystical  and  equivocal  watchwords :  "Samoder- 
javie,"  "Pravoslavie,"  "Narodnost,"  autocracy, 
orthodoxy,  nationality — to  the  three  revolu- 
tionary watchwords,  "Liberty,  Equality,  Fra- 
ternity." No  doubt  it  is  quite  possible  to  see 
in  the  Slavophile  doctrine  a  healthy  reaction 
against  a  blind  imitation  of  the  West,  it  is  quite 
possible  to  read  a  deeper  meaning  into  the 
Slavophile  Trinity,  just  as  it  is  quite  possible 
to  read  a  perverted  meaning  into  the  French 
Trinity. 

The  Slavophile  principle  of  "Samoderjavie," 
or  Autocracy,  may  only  stand  for  the  necessity 


220  GREAT  RUSSIA 

of  a  strong  executive  counteracting  the  cen- 
trifugal forces  and  the  disintegrating  elements 
of  the  Russian  Empire.  It  may  only  express  a 
belief  in  the  value  of  the  Monarchy,  as  a  visible 
sign  of  political  unity. 

"Pravoslavie,"  or  Orthodoxy,  may  only  stand 
for  the  significance  of  a  national  Church  in  the 
life  of  the  people.  It  may  only  mean  the  rec- 
ognition of  the  importance  of  spiritual  unity  as 
the  foundation  of  political  unity. 

"Narodnost,"  or  Nationality,  may  only  stand 
for  the  recognition  of  the  democratic  principle, 
for  loyalty  to  a  national  ideal.  It  may  only 
express  a  healthy  distrust  of  the  many  alien 
races  within  the  Russian  Empire. 

But  although  the  Slavophile  doctrines  are 
capable  of  a  liberal  and  democratic  interpreta- 
tion, and  have  actually  received  a  liberal  inter- 
pretation from  noble  spirits  like  Samarine, 
Aksakov,  and  Dostoevsky,  such  certainly  has 
not  been  the  interpretation  which  they  have  re- 
ceived from  those  pillars  of  reaction,  Katkov 
and  Pobiedonostsev.  In  recent  Russian  his- 
tory, Slavophilism  has  only  been  too  often  a 
creed  of  hatred  and  intolerance,  the  creed  of  the 
Soiouz  Ruskago  Naroda,  "of  that  infamous 
League  of  the  Russian  people,"  the  oppressors 


RUSSIAN  POLITICAL  EVILS     221 

of  the  Poles,  the  butchers  of  the  Jews,  the  perse- 
cutors of  the  Uniats. 

Through  the  influence  of  reactionaries  it  has 
come  about  that  the  theory  of  "Samoderjavie" 
has  been  perverted  into  a  Byzantine  despotism. 
The  theory  of  "Pravoslavie"  the  principle  of  a 
National  Church  which,  as  the  case  of  Ireland 
proves,  may  be  the  very  reverse  of  a  State 
Church,  has  been  perverted  into  the  dogma  of 
Csesaro-papism.  The  democratic  principle  of 
"Narodnost"  has  been  perverted  into  the  claim 
of  the  stronger  nationality  to  crush  the  weaker. 

Slavophiles  would  make  us  believe  that 
Slavism  expresses  the  pure  undiluted  Russian 
spirit.  Unfortunately  the  Slavism  of  Katkov 
is  often  undistinguishable  from  Pan-Slavism, 
and  Pan-Slavism  is  but  the  twin  brother  to  Pan- 
Germanism.  Slavophiles  are  never  tired  of  ex- 
tolling their  principles  as  rooted  in  national  tra- 
dition. Let  them  beware  lest  those  so-called 
traditional  principles  only  represent  the  tradi- 
tions of  a  German  bureaucracy  and  of  a  Pots- 
dam monarchy:  and,  unfortunately,  it  is  only 
too  true  that  those  traditions  have  prevailed  at 
St.  Petersburg  for  two  hundred  years.  At  the 
beginning  of  the  war  the  German  name  of 
Petersburg  was  changed  into  the  Russian  name 


222  GREAT  RUSSIA 

of  Petrograd.  But,  alas!  it  was  not  only  the 
name  of  the  capital  which  had  been  German. 
The  Russian  Government  itself  was  controlled 
by  hyphenated  Teutonized  Russians,  by  the 
German  Barons  of  the  Baltic  Provinces.  Even 
the  Russian  Foreign  Policy  was  directed  from 
the  Wilhelmstrasse  and  the  politicians  who  op- 
pressed the  Slav  brethren  of  Poland  joined 
hands  with  the  Prussian  Hakatists  who  op- 
pressed the  Slav  brethren  of  Posen.  The  All- 
Powerful  Academy  of  Sciences  of  St.  Peters- 
burg was  a  duplicate  of  the  Berlin  Academy, 
and  refused  to  open  its  doors  even  to  a  Men- 
delieff.  The  intellectuals  of  the  universities 
were  inoculated  with  the  poison  of  German 
economic  and  political  materialism.  Bazarov, 
the  Father  of  Nihilism  in  Turgenev's  "Fathers 
and  Sons,"  was  a  disciple  of  Buchner  and 
Haeckel. 

A  hundred  years  ago,  Alexander  I,  the  most 
liberal  ruler  of  Russian  history,  was  the  pupil 
of  Laharpe,  himself  a  disciple  of  the  French 
Revolutionists,  and  all  through  his  reign  Alex- 
ander remained  under  the  influence  of  French 
Liberalism.  The  Alliance  of  the  French  de- 
mocracy with  the  Russian  Monarchy  is  based 
on  political  sympathies  and  elective  affinities. 


RUSSIAN  POLITICAL  EVILS     223 

However  much  the  reactionaries  of  the  Katkov 
School  may  distrust  the  principles  of  1789,  it 
is  under  the  French  banner,  it  is  in  the  name 
of  the  immortal  principles  of  1789,  which  were 
also  the  guiding  principles  of  the  American 
Revolution,  that  civilization  is  taking  up  arms 
against  Prussianism  and  Pan-Germanism. 
After  the  war  those  principles  adapted  to  Rus- 
sian conditions  will  triumph  in  the  internal  pol- 
icy of  the  Russian  Empire  as  they  are  guiding 
its  foreign  policy.  It  would  indeed  be  the 
most  tragic  paradox  of  all  human  history  if 
millions  of  Russian  patriots  had  laid  down 
their  lives  to  conquer  freedom  for  their  Slav 
brethren  only  to  be  themselves  denied  freedom 
at  home,  and  if  the  Russian  Government  were 
fighting  for  the  liberty  of  the  Balkan  national- 
ities only  to  repress  the  legitimate  aspirations 
of  the  nationalities  gathered  under  the  Russian 
flag. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  RUSSIAN  WAR  OF  LIBERA- 
TION A  HUNDRED  YEARS 
AGO,    AND    TOLSTOY'S 
"WAR  AND  PEACE" 


IT  is  now  exactly  a  hundred  years  since 
Napoleon  crossed  the  Niemen  and  de- 
clared war  to  his  former  friend  and  ally, 
Alexander  I.  Like  the  passing  of  the  Rubicon 
by  Csesar,  the  crossing  of  the  Niemen  marks  a 
turning-point  in  human  history.  Everything  in 
the  Russian  campaign  is  stupendous,  and  stag- 
gers our  imagination.  The  numbers  engaged 
are  on  a  scale  hitherto  unexampled  in  military 
annals.  The  most  moderate  computation  ex- 
ceeds half  a  million.  Nor  is  the  composition 
of  the  "Grand  Army"  less  extraordinary  than 
its  numbers.  It  is  too  often  forgotten  that  in 
the  Russian  campaign  the  French  were  in  a  mi- 
nority. Half  the  nations  of  the  Continent  had 
sent  their  contingents  to  the  Lord  of  the  World. 

Danes,   Spaniards,   Austrians,   Poles,   had  all 
224 


RUSSIAN  WAR  OF  LIBERATION     225 

been  coaxed  or  driven  into  the  service  of  the 
Corsican,  and  were  to  adorn  the  supreme  tri- 
umph of  Napoleon's  career. 

And  from  beginning  to  end  the  Russian  Cam- 
paign is  a  succession  of  dramatic  contrasts  and 
of  tragic  incidents.  The  conflict  between  the 
civilized  Frenchman  and  the  semi-barbarous 
Muscovite,  the  novel  theatre  of  the  war,  the 
vast  Russian  plain  alluring  and  devouring  the 
invader,  the  guerilla  tactics  of  the  Cossacks,  the 
ghastly  shambles  of  Borodino,  followed  by 
the  victorious  entry  into  Moscow,  the  burning 
of  the  capital  in  the  very  hour  of  victory,  the 
gradual  approach  of  the  Arctic  winter,  the  hur- 
ried retreat,  the  infinite  expanse  covered  with 
snow  as  with  a  winding  sheet,  the  heroism  of 
Murat  and  Ney,  recalling  the  Homeric  age,  the 
disaster  of  the  Berezina,  the  secret  flight  of 
Napoleon  in  the  dead  of  night,  and,  as  the  last 
phase,  a  few  straggling  and  famished  hordes 
returning  to  the  Polish  frontier,  a  remnant  of 
what  had  been,  six  months  before,  a  formidable 
host — all  those  scenes  and  incidents  are  written 
in  indelible  characters  in  the  annals  of  human 
folly  and  human  suffering,  and  make  the  cam- 
paign of  Russia  one  of  the  most  impressive  ca- 
tastrophes of  all  times. 


226  GREAT  RUSSIA 

II 

It  is  this  catastrophe  which  is  the  subject 
of  Tolstoy's  novel.  Only  a  literary  giant  like 
Tolstoy  could  have  done  justice  to  so  gigantic 
a  theme,  and  it  is  through  this  unique  combina- 
tion of  a  wonderful  subject  with  a  wonderful 
genius  that  "War  and  Peace"  takes  rank  as  one 
of  the  supreme  masterpieces  of  world  literature. 
"War  and  Peace"  is  one  of  the  miracles  of 
literary  art,  and,  like  every  miracle,  it  neces- 
sarily evades  us.  We  cannot  explain  how  the 
miracle  came  into  being.  We  can  only  con- 
template the  achievement.  We  can  only  ad- 
mire and  inadequately  analyse  the  magic  powers 
displayed:  the  creative  imagination  which 
breathes  life  into  every  scene  and  every  charac- 
ter, and  which,  indeed,  makes  the  fictitious 
characters  stand  out  more  vividly  than  the  his- 
torical, the  infallible  observation  and  sense  of 
reality  which  seizes  on  the  most  minute  details, 
and  which  selects  with  infallible  tact  the  most 
characteristic  touches;  the  universal  outlook 
which  embraces  every  aspect  and  every  class  of 
society,  which  introduces  us  to  the  drawing- 
room  of  the  society  woman,  to  the  closet  of  the 
statesman,  and  to  the  hut  of  the  peasant;  and, 


RUSSIAN  WAR  OF  LIBERATION     227 

above  all,  the  divine  gift  of  sympathy,  which 
can  feel  with  every  suffering,  which  can  read 
into  every  heart,  into  the  soul  of  sinner  and 
saint,  of  young  and  old,  of  the  worldling  and 
of  the  common  people. 

And  as  we  can  only  inadequately  analyse  the 
powers  displayed,  so  we  can  only  dimly  guess 
the  methods  employed.  One  of  Tolstoy's  fa- 
vourite methods  is  the  method  of  contrast,  and 
that  method  is  illustrated  in  the  very  title  of 
the  book.  For  we  may  observe  that  the  title 
is  not  "The  Great  War."  The  title  is  "War 
and  Peace."  The  author  gives  us  the  action 
and  reaction  of  the  one  on  the  other.  He  does 
not  give  the  military  events  separately.  He 
gives  us  the  battle  scenes  on  the  background  of 
the  domestic  drama.  He  makes  the  pomp  and 
circumstance  of  war  alternate  with  the  peaceful 
pursuits  of  everyday  life.  He  shows  us  events, 
not  merely  from  the  vantage-ground  of  the  bat- 
tlefield, but  from  the  more  important  point  of 
view  of  those  who  are  left  at  home.  He  tells 
us  of  the  war  as  it  affects  the  old  prince  on  his 
remote  estate,  or  as  it  impresses  the  wives  and 
mothers  whose  dear  ones  are  taken  away  from 
them.  Whilst  in  one  scene  the  hero  is  dying  in 
the  stillness  of  the  starry  night,  in  the  next 


228  GREAT  RUSSIA 

scene  the  heroine  is  making  love,  and  the  little 
ironies  and  comedies  of  ordinary  life  only 
heighten  the  effect  of  the  tragedy. 

Ill 

But  "War  and  Peace"  is  not  only  an  inspiring 
epic,  the  Iliad  of  the  Russian  people.  It  also 
contains  an  ethical  message  of  weighty  import. 
From  his  protracted  absorption  in  his  great 
theme,  Tolstoy  has  emerged  with  a  new  concep- 
tion of  war  and  a  new  conception  of  life.  De- 
scribing the  military  incidents  of  the  campaign, 
he  has  come  to  close  quarters  with  the  horrors 
of  modern  warfare,  with  the  wholesale  and 
treacherous  butchery  of  gun  and  grapeshot, 
which  makes  no  difference  between  coward  and 
hero.  The  once  dashing  young  officer  of  the 
Crimea  is  transformed  into  an  ardent  anti-mili- 
tarist. And  thus  the  record  of  a  great  patriotic 
war  indirectly  becomes  a  plea  in  the  favour  of 
peace.  Or,  again,  studying  the  high  life  of 
Petersburg  and  Moscow,  Tolstoy  cannot  help 
contrasting  the  selfishness  and  frivolity  of  the 
upper  classes  with  the  quiet  heroism  and  the 
resignation  of  the  illiterate  peasant.  And  thus, 
what  appears  at  first  sight  as  a  description  of 
Russian   society   life,    becomes   indirectly   the 


RUSSIAN  WAR  OF  LIBERATION     229 

glorification  of  democracy.  Or  again,  tracing 
the  action  between  cause  and  effect,  Tolstoi  has 
observed  how  at  every  stage  the  individual  will 
is  overruled  by  a  Higher  Will ;  how  in  the  bat- 
tlefield the  leader  does  not  lead,  but  follows; 
how  victory  and  defeat  are  equally  at  the  mercy 
of  forces  beyond  human  control.  And  thus  we 
see  the  gambler  and  Bohemian  of  earlier  years 
transformed  into  a  Russian  Puritan  and  a  Chris- 
tian Nihilist. 

But  although  the  burning  problems  of  mod- 
ern life  are  presented  to  us  in  all  their  aspects, 
Tolstoy  is  too  much  of  an  artist  to  obtrude  his 
own  theories  upon  his  audience.  He  lets  life 
teach  its  own  lessons,  and  he  lets  the  reader 
draw  his  own  moral.  From  the  first  page  to 
the  last  he  remains  the  objective  creator;  stand- 
ing, as  it  were,  outside  and  above  his  own  crea- 
tion, he  retains  his  impartiality  and  his  serenity. 
No  doubt  he  writes  with  a  purpose,  but  the 
purpose  is  hidden  from  us.  The  time  will  soon 
come  in  the  life  of  Tolstoy  when  the  story  will 
be  overweighted  with  the  message,  and  when 
the  story-teller  will  recede  in  the  background 
and  surrender  to  the  leader  and  preacher.  But 
until  the  "final  conversion"  he  maintains  that 
perfect  equilibrium  which  is  so  rarely  met  with 


230  GREAT  RUSSIA 

in  literature,  that  harmony  between  the  creative 
artist  and  the  thinker  where  neither  encroaches 
on  the  province  of  the  other,  and  where  each 
remain  supreme  in  his  own  sphere. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY 


PEACE  still  seems  far  off.  In  the  words 
of  the  King's  message:  "The  end  is 
not  even  in  sight."  We  do  not  know 
when  it  will  come  or  how  it  will  come,  but  we 
do  know  that  the  settlement  will  largely  de- 
pend on  Russia.  Russia  is  to-day  for  the 
Kaiser  the  most  formidable  enemy  on  land  as 
she  was  the  most  formidable  enemy  for  Na- 
poleon. Russia  can  be  invaded,  but  she  can- 
not be  conquered.  She  can  be  beaten,  but  no 
people  possess  greater  recuperative  power.  The 
Russian  Government  have  pledged  themselves 
that  they  shall  make  no  separate  peace.  There 
is  no  reason  to  believe  that,  if  they  can  help  it, 
they  will  break  their  pledge.  But  in  a  world 
conflagration  unexpected  catastrophes  may  al- 
ways happen  and  it  is  the  duty  of  a  far-seeing 
statesman  to  bring  even  the  unexpected  into 

their  calculations.     A  hundred  years  ago  the 
231 


232  GREAT  RUSSIA 

members  of  the  European  coalition  repeatedly 
entered  into  a  solemn  engagement  that  they 
would  make  no  separate  peace.  The  engage- 
ment broke  down  under  the  stress  of  circum- 
stances. It  is  at  least  conceivable  that  circum- 
stances, say  the  pressure  of  a  national  disaster 
or  an  internal  revolution,  might  again  prove  too 
strong  even  for  the  most  resolute  Government, 
and  no  Russian  Government  would  dare  refuse 
a  separate  peace  if  the  vital  necessities  of  the 
people  demanded  it.  A  few  months  ago  the 
resistance  of  Russia  was  completely  paralyzed 
for  lack  of  ammunition.  It  might  be  paralyzed 
again.  Her  most  prosperous  provinces  are  rav- 
aged. Grave  internal  difficulties  are  ever 
threatening  her.  And  it  is  probably  in  response 
to  popular  demand  that  even  so  strong  a  gen- 
eralissimo as  Grand  Duke  Nicholas  was  re- 
moved from  the  supreme  command.  One  can 
therefore  imagine  a  combination  of  tragic  cir- 
cumstances where  the  Russian  Government 
might  be  unable  to  resist  the  political,  financial 
and  military  pressure,  and  might  be  reduced 
to  accept  an  inconclusive  peace.  For  Russia 
as  well  as  for  ourselves  the  danger  of  an  incon- 
clusive peace  is  by  far  the  greatest  peril  which 
threatens  us  in  the  future.     The  Russian  For- 


RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY        233 

eign  Secretary  recently  made  a  disquieting  an- 
nouncement, that  the  Russian  Government  will 
make  no  independent  peace  as  long  as  one  single 
German  soldier  remains  on  Russian  territory. 
But  what  if  the  last  German  soldier  were  to 
withdraw?  Russia  will  certainly  not  make  a 
dishonourable  peace,  but  what  if  financial  ex- 
haustion and  internal  dissension,  aided  by  Ger- 
man intrigue  and  a  short-sighted  and  faint- 
hearted policy,  compelled  her  to  accept  an  hon- 
ourable peace, — such  a  peace  as  Bismarck 
granted  to  Austria  after  Sadowa. 

Let  us  be  under  no  delusion;  as  the  war  is 
being  protracted,  as  the  economic  and  military 
pressure  increases,  as  the  decision  is  being  de- 
layed, there  exists,  at  least,  a  remote  danger  of 
a  breach  in  the  European  Alliance.  I  admit 
that  the  chances  are  very  remote,  but  Germany 
may  be  depended  upon  to  make  the  most  of 
those  chances,  and  to  use  all  the  influence  she 
has  got  in  Russia  to  compass  her  ends.  It  is, 
therefore,  of  the  greatest  practical  interest  to 
analyse  the  nature  of  the  influence  which  Ger- 
many actually  does  wield  in  the  Empire  of  the 
Tsar,  the  precise  nature  of  the  relations  be- 
tween Germany  and  Russia  and  the  means  Ger- 
many possesses  of  controlling  the  internal  and 


234  GREAT  RUSSIA 

foreign  policy  of  the  country,  and  of  eventually 
deflecting  the  currents  of  public  opinion. 

II 

The  complicated  and  contradictory  relations 
between  the  two  countries  can  be  summed  up 
very  briefly.  On  the  one  hand,  there  existed 
before  the  war  the  closest  intercourse  between 
the  Russian  and  the  German  courts,  and  that 
close  intercourse  extended  to  the  army,  to  the 
bureaucracy,  to  the  universities,  to  the  indus- 
trial and  commercial  classes.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  Russian  and  the  German  people  are 
mutually  repellent.  There  is  a  temperamental 
antagonism  between  the  two  nations,  between 
the  dour  disciplined  Prussian  and  the  easy- 
going, undisciplined  Russian.  In  the  province 
of  ideas,  of  art  and  literature,  French  influence 
is  dominant  amongst  the  intellectual  and  in  the 
upper  classes,  but  as  literature  counts  for  very 
little,  and  as  trade  and  industry,  the  bureaucracy 
and  the  court  count  for  a  very  great  deal,  and 
as  all  these  social  and  political  forces  hitherto 
were  almost  entirely  controlled  by  the  Germans, 
it  may  be  said  that  before  the  war  German  in- 
fluence was  supreme  in  the  Russian  Empire. 


RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY       235 

III 

Until  Peter  the  Great,  the  Romanov  family 
was  a  national  dynasty.  It  had  remained  na- 
tional from  sheer  necessity,  as  no  European 
court  would  have  cared  to  intermarry  with  Tar- 
tar and  Barbarian  princes.  Even  at  the  end  of 
Peter  the  Great's  reign,  the  prestige  of  Russia 
had  scarcely  asserted  itself  in  the  politics  of  the 
West.  Peter  the  Great  expressed  a  keen  desire 
to  pay  a  visit  to  the  court  of  Louis  XIV.  He 
was  politely  given  to  understand  that  his  visit 
would  not  be  acceptable,  even  as  a  poor  relation 
will  be  told  that  his  visit  is  not  welcome  to  a 
kinsman  in  exalted  position.  After  the  death 
of  Louis,  the  Tsar  again  asked  to  be  received 
at  Versailles.  This  time  his  overtures  were  ac- 
cepted, but  even  at  the  court  of  the  Regent  his 
visit  caused  the  greatest  embarrassment  to  the 
masters  of  ceremonies.  The  situation  was  a 
tragic-comic  one.  French  etiquette  could  not 
decide  whether  the  Tartar  Prince  was  to  receive 
the  honours  which  belong  of  right  only  to  the 
ruler  of  a  civilized  people. 

For  the  first  time  in  modern  Russian  history, 
Peter  the  Great's  daughter,  Anne,  married  a 
German  prince  in  1725.     With  that  year  be- 


236  GREAT  RUSSIA 

gins  that  close  dynastic  alliance  with  the  Ger- 
man courts  which  has  lasted  until  our  own  day. 
Germany  has  been  carrying  on  a  most  thriving 
export  trade  of  Princes  and  Princesses  with  al- 
most every  European  monarchy,  an  export  trade 
of  which  she  is  reaping  enormous  political  ad- 
vantage in  the  present  crisis.  But  in  Russia 
4  alone  she  has  obtained  a  monopoly  of  this  royal 
export  trade.  All  the  Russian  Tsars  have  mar- 
ried German  Princesses.  For  one  hundred  and 
fifty  years  the  rule  suffered  no  exception  until 
Alexander  II  married  a  daughter  of  the  Danish 
dynasty,  which  itself  is  really  the  German 
dynasty  of  Oldenburg. 

I  need  not  emphasise  the  supreme  importance 
of  those  close  family  relations  between  the 
Courts  of  Russia  and  Germany,  and  especially 
between  the  Courts  of  Russia  and  Prussia.  It 
is  the  peculiarity  of  an  autocratic  Government 
that  the  smallest  causes  are  productive  of  the 
greatest  consequences  and  amongst  those  smaller 
causes  none  are  likely  to  produce  more  far  reach- 
ing results  than  the  personal  likes  and  dislikes 
of  the  ruler  and  his  family.  In  the  Empire  of 
the  Tsars  the  sympathies  of  the  ruler  and  of  the 
Imperial  family  for  a  hundred  and  fifty  years 
have  generally  been  German.     Women  have  no 


RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY        237 

less  influence  in  Russia  than  in  other  countries, 
and  as  every  Russian  Princess  has,  for  a  hun- 
dred and  fifty  years,  been  German  in  origin, 
German  by  training,  German  by  pride  of  birth, 
German  by  prejudice,  the  Teutonic  influences 
have  necessarily  been  supreme  in  the  Russian 
Court.  Nor  must  we  forget  that  every  German 
Princess  coming  to  Petrograd  would  bring  with 
her  a  numerous  suite  of  ladies-in-waiting  and 
court  officials,  so  that  the  German  Court  colony 
was  automatically  increasing.  Indeed  it  is  no 
mere  chance  that  the  capital,  the  military  har- 
bour and  the  chief  imperial  residences  should  all 
have  German  names — Kronstadt  Oranienbaum, 
Schlussenburg,  Petersburg  and  Peterhof. 
Peterhof  has  been  the  Russian  Potsdam. 
Petersburg  has  been  the  outpost  of  Germany  in 
the  Russian  Empire,  the  "feste  Burg"  of  Prus- 
sia until  the  eve  of  the  war. 

IV 

From  what  has  been  said,  it  is  obvious  that  the 
national  Romanov  dynasty,  founded  in  1613 
by  Michael  Romanov,  patriarch  of  all  the  Rus- 
sias,  ceased  to  be  a  Romanov  dynasty  at  the 
death  of  Empress  Elizabeth  in  1761.  With 
Peter  III,  it  is  a  German  dynasty  which  ascends 


\S 


238  GREAT  RUSSIA 

the  throne.  Peter  III,  son  of  a  duke  of  Hol- 
stein-Gottorp,  is  a  Romanov  in  the  proportion 
of  one-half;  Paul,  son  of  a  Princess  of  Anhalt- 
Zerlst,  in  the  proportion  of  one-fourth;  Alex- 
ander I  and  Nicholas  I,  sons  of  a  Princess  of 
Wiirttemberg,  in  the  proportion  of  one-eighth; 
Alexander  II,  son  of  a  Princess  of  Hohenzol- 
lern,  to  the  extent  of  one-sixteenth;  Alexander 
III,  son  of  a  Grand-Duchess  of  Hesse-Darm- 
stadt, to  the  extent  of  one  thirty-second,  and 
the  present  ruler,  Nicholas  II,  who  married  a 
Princess  of  the  House  of  Oldenburg,  to  the  ex- 
tent of  one  sixty-fourth.  One  sixty-fourth  of 
the  blood  of  the  present  Tsar  is  Russian  Ro- 
manov blood.  In  the  proportion  of  sixty- 
three  sixty-fourths  (*f)  it  is  the  blood  of  Hol- 
stein,  of  Anhalt,  of  Oldenburg,  of  Hesse,  of 
Wiirttemberg,  of  Hohenzollern  which  flows 
through  the  veins  of  the  Emperor  of  all  the 
Russias. 

V 

The  history  of  Russia  proves  only  too  con- 
clusively that  again  and  again  her  national  in- 
terests have  been  sacrificed  to  the  German 
dynastic  influences.  At  the  end  of  the  Seven 
Years'  War,  Frederick  the  Great  was  at  his  last 


RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY        239 

gasp.  Prussia  was  on  the  verge  of  ruin.  The 
Russian  army  had  entered  Berlin;  the  power  of 
the  new  military  monarchy  had  been  totally 
broken  at  Kunersdorf.  The  death  of  Elizabeth 
and  the  accession  of  her  mad  nephew,  Peter 
III,  retrieved  a  desperate  situation.  For  the 
mad  nephew  was  a  German  Prince,  a  Duke  of 
Holstein  and  a  passionate  admirer  of  Frederick 
the  Great.  Peter  III  was  murdered  in  1762. 
He  reigned  only  a  few  months,  but  he  reigned 
sufficiently  long  to  save  Prussia  from  destruc- 
tion and  to  surrender  all  the  advantages  secured 
by  Russian  triumphs  and  dearly  paid  for  by 
Russian  blood. 

VI 

There  is  no  more  fantastic  fairy  tale  and  there 
is  no  more  arresting  drama  than  the  life  story 
of  Catherine  the  Great  which  recently  has  been 
so  brilliantly  told  by  Mr.  Francis  Gribble.  A 
Cinderella  amongst  German  royalties,  a  pauper 
princess  of  Anhalt-Zerbst,  Catherine  became  the 
mightiest  potentate  of  her  age.  Although  the 
nominee  of  Frederick  the  Great,  she  pursued 
consistently  a  national  Russian  policy.  And 
she  had  good  reasons  for  doing  so.  For  no 
throne  was  less  secure  than  the  throne  of  the 


240  GREAT  RUSSIA 

Romanovs.    She  had  had  to  remove  her  husband 
by  murder  for  fear  of  being  removed  herself. 
She  continued  to  be  surrounded  by  a  rabble  of 
unscrupulous  adventurers  and  intriguers.     Her 
only  safety  lay  in  becoming  a  patriotic  Rus- 
sian,  and  in  seeking  the  support  of  Russian 
sentiment  and  Russian  opinion.     Whilst  Fred- 
erick the  Great  surrounded  himself  with  French 
advisers  and  contemptuously  refused  even  to 
speak  the  German  language,  whilst  he  declared 
to  the  German  scholar  who  presented  him  with 
a  copy  of  the  "Nibelungen  Lied"  that  this  na- 
tional German  epic  was  not  worth  a  pipe  of  to- 
bacco, Catherine  the  Great  systematically  en- 
couraged Russian  literature.     Whilst  Frederick 
the  Great  remained  the  consistent  atheist  on  the 
throne,  Catherine  the  Great  professed  the  ut- 
most zeal  for  Russian  orthodoxy.     All  through 
her  reign  she  avoided  as  far  as  possible  a  con- 
flict with  Frederick  and  his  successor.     She  di- 
vided with  them  the  spoils  of  Poland,  or  as 
Frederick  the  Great  put  it  in  his  edifying  theo- 
logical language,  she  partook  of  the  eucharistic 
body  of  the  Kingdom  in  unholy  communion 
with  Prussia  and  Austria.     But  Catherine  saw 
to  it  that  Russia  secured  the  greater  part  of  the 
spoils. 


RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY        241 

VII 

There  is  a  curious  and  uncanny  similarity  be- 
tween the  character  and  the  reign  of  Peter  III 
and  the  character  and  reign  of  his  son,  Paul  I. 
Both  reigns  were  brief,  yet  both  reigns  had  an 
incalculable  influence  on  European  affairs. 
Both  rulers  sacrificed  national  interests  to  dynas- 
tic interests.  Both  rulers  were  insane  and  both 
engaged  in  insane  enterprises.  Both  rulers 
were  murdered  with  the  complicity  or  conniv- 
ance of  their  own  family.  The  Russian  armies 
on  the  advent  of  Peter  III  had  secured  and 
achieved  a  dramatic  victory  over  Prussia,  but 
the  admiration  of  Peter  III  for  Frederick  the 
Great  prevented  Russia  from  reaping  the  fruits 
of  victory.  Suvorov  crossed  the  Alps  and 
achieved  an  equally  sensational  victory  over 
France,  but  Paul  I  was  prevented  from  taking 
advantage  of  his  victories  by  his  admiration  for 
Napoleon. 

VIII 

The  reign  of  Alexander  I  once  more  strikingly 
illustrates  the  enormous  part  which  subter- 
ranean German  influences  have  played  in  the 
foreign  policy  of  Russia.     After  the  costly  vie- 


242  GREAT  RUSSIA 

tories  of  Eylau,  and  Friedland,  Napoleon  I 
had  concluded  with  Alexander  I  the  Peace  of 
Tilsit.  The  treaty  was  fatal  to  Europe,  for  it 
divided  the  Continent  practically  between  the 
Russian  and  French  Empires.  But  it  was 
highly  advantageous  to  Russia  and  enormously 
added  to  Russian  power  and  Russian  prestige. 

It  was  certainly  in  Russia's  interest  to  main- 
tain the  alliance.  It  was  broken  largely 
through  one  of  those  small  dynastic  incidents 
which  are  of  such  vast  importance  under  an 
absolute  despotism.  One  of  Napoleon's  main 
objects  was  to  establish  a  Napoleonic  dynasty 
and  to  be  adopted  by  marriage  into  one  of  the 
ruling  families  of  Europe.  The  Corsican  par- 
venu passionately  desired  a  matrimonial  alli- 
ance with  the  House  of  Romanov,  and  repeat- 
edly applied  for  the  hand  of  one  of  Alexander's 
sisters.  The  dowager  Tsarina,  Alexander's 
mother,  a  daughter  of  the  King  of  Wiirttem- 
berg,  as  persistently  refused.  She  had  all  the 
pride  of  birth  of  a  German  Princess  and  all  the 
hatred  of  a  reactionary  against  the  armed  sol- 
dier of  the  Revolution.  Foiled  at  the  Court  of 
Petersburg,  Napoleon  was  more  successful  at 
the  Court  of  Vienna.  A  few  months  after  Na- 
poleon's last  overtures  had  been  rejected  by 


RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY        243 

Russia,  the  Hapsburgs,  who,  after  the  Bour- 
bons, were  the  most  august,  the  most  ancient 
dynasty  of  Europe,  eagerly  accepted  what  the 
Romanovs  had  refused.  The  War  of  1812 
with  Russia  was  the  result  of  that  pro-German 
policy  of  the  Russian  Court. 

IX 

During  the  reigns  of  Nicholas  I  and  Alexander 
II  the  German-Austrian  influence  reached  its 
zenith  at  the  Court  of  Petersburg.  Nicholas  I 
was  the  brother-in-law  of  the  Prussian  Hohen- 
zollern.  An  able  and  an  honest  man  in  his  pri- 
vate relations,  he  was  in  his  political  capacity  a 
Prussian  martinet,  as  even  Treitschke  is  com- 
pelled to  admit,  and  he  organized  his  empire  on 
the  strictest  Frederician  principles.  The  court, 
the  army,  and  the  bureaucracy  were  Prussian- 
ized as  they  had  never  been  before.  A  German 
bureaucrat,  Nesselrode,  who  could  not  even 
speak  the  Russian  language,  for  forty  years  con- 
trolled, as  foreign  minister,  the  policy  of  the 
Russian  Empire.  Even  as  his  grandfather, 
Peter  III,  even  as  his  brother,  Alexander  I,  had 
saved  Prussia  from  destruction,  so  Nicholas  I 
saved  Austria  from  a  similar  fate.  Francis 
Joseph  had  ascended  a  throne  shaken  to  its 


244  GREAT  RUSSIA 

foundations.  Hungary  was  in  open  rebellion. 
The  young  Austrian  Emperor  appealed  to  Rus- 
sia for  help.  Nicholas  I  sent  an  army  to  quell 
the  revolution  and  established  his  cousin  on  the 
Hungarian  throne.  It  is  unnecessary  to  add 
that  Francis  Joseph  was  as  loyal  and  as  grateful 
to  Russia  as  Frederick  the  Great  had  been. 

Alexander  I  had  refused  to  accept  Napoleon 
I  as  a  brother-in-law.  Even  so  did  Nicholas 
I  refuse  to  recognize  Napoleon  III  as  Emperor 
of  the  French.  It  was  a  gratuitous  insult  in- 
spired by  Prussia,  it  was  opposed  to  Russian  in- 
terests and  it  was  one  of  the  main  causes  of  the 
Crimean  War. 


X 


Under  Alexander  II  the  alliance  of  the  three 
reactionary  empires  of  Central  Europe  was 
welded  even  more  firmly  than  under  his  prede- 
cessor. Bismarck  during  his  tenure  of  the  Prus- 
sian Embassy  at  Petersburg  was  the  chosen  fa- 
vorite of  the  Russian  Court.  An  understanding 
with  Russia  became  the  chief  dogma  of  his  po- 
litical creed  and  it  remained  so  until  the  end. 
It  was  Bismarck's  adherence  to  the  Russian- 
Prussian  Alliance  which  was  one  of  the  causes 
of  the  dismissal. 


RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY        245 

Alexander  II  did  nothing  to  guard  against  the 
German  peril.  He  might  have  been  the  umpire 
of  Central  Europe  as  Alexander  I  had  been  fifty 
years  before.  He  demanded  no  compensation 
for  the  enormous  accession  of  power  and  terri- 
tory which  Germany  had  received  through  the 
victorious  wars  of  1863,  1866  and  1870.  He 
insisted  on  no  guarantees.  When  after  Sedan, 
Thiers  came  to  St.  Petersburg  to  obtain  the  in- 
tervention of  the  Russian  Empire,  he  was  dis- 
missed with  empty  words.  One  year  after 
Thiers'  fruitless  journey,  Emperor  William  paid 
an  official  visit  to  his  nephew,  Alexander  II,  and 
the  Tsar  once  more  proclaimed  the  indissoluble 
solidarity  of  Russia  with  Germany.  Until  the 
end  of  his  reign  the  German-Austrian-Russian 
Alliance,  the  famous  dynastic  Alliance  of  the 
Three  Emperors  remained  the  keystone  of  Eu- 
ropean policy  and  the  mainstay  of  Russian  re- 
action. 

XI 

The  influence  of  Germany  at  the  Russian  Court 
was  strengthened  by  the  influence  of  Germany 
on  the  Russian  bureaucracy.  An  agricultural 
community  without  a  middle  class,  Russia  has 
had  to  recruit  her  civil  services  almost  entirely 


246  GREAT  RUSSIA 

from  the  outside,  mainly  from  Germany  and 
more  especially  from  the  German  Baltic  prov- 
inces of  Esthonia,  Livonia  and  Courland. 
Teutonic  barons  from  those  Baltic  provinces 
have  filled  the  higher  ranks  of  the  diplomatic 
service  and  of  the  civil  service  for  a  hundred  and 
fifty  years.  The  Russian  Tsars  found  the  Ger- 
man barons  far  more  serviceable  tools  than  the 
Russian  boiars.  In  a  previous  age  one  Em- 
peror after  another  had  been  removed  by  a  re- 
bellious aristocracy.  The  highest  nobles  in  the 
land  had  been  implicated  in  the  Decabrist  con- 
spiracy at  the  end  of  Alexander  I's  reign.  Even 
under  Alexander  II  there  were  always  a  few 
members  of  the  nobility  to  be  found  as  accom- 
plices in  the  revolutionary  plots.  But  there 
never  was  one  single  German  from  the  Baltic 
provinces  implicated  in  a  conspiracy  against  re- 
action. It  is  easy  to  understand,  therefore,  why 
a  Russian  autocrat  should  have  preferred  the 
services  of  the  German  Baltic  barons.  The 
Russian  nobleman  is  casual,  lavish,  a  bad  econo- 
mist, easy-going,  generous,  and  he  is  corrupt  be- 
cause he  is  easy-going  and  generous.  He  is  also 
much  more  independent.  The  Junker  is  punc- 
tual, precise,  disciplined,  generally  poor  always 


RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY       247 

ambitious.  He  is  also  tolerably  honest.  He 
is  the  ideal  bureaucrat. 

XII 

German  influence  has  been  no  less  dominant  in 
the  Russian  academies  and  in  scientific  institu- 
tions. The  Academy  of  Sciences  of  St.  Peters- 
burg was  organized  on  the  pattern  of  the  Acad- 
emy of  Berlin.  It  was  an  official  institution 
with  high  privileges  and  it  remained  consistently 
German.  Until  recently  its  proceedings  were 
published  in  the  German  language  and  German 
scientists  were  invariably  preferred  rather  than 
Russian  scientists.  Mendelieff,  one  of  the  most 
creative  scientific  minds  of  his  generation,  was 
a  member  of  every  European  academy  except 
the  Academy  of  Petersburg. 

The  Germans  have  been  an  even  greater 
power  in  the  Russian  universities.  They  took 
full  advantage  of  the  prestige  which  German 
science  had  acquired  in  Europe,  and  they  largely 
filled  the  ranks  of  the  Liberal  professions.  Ger- 
man doctors,  German  veterinary  surgeons,  Ger- 
man "Feldschers,"  German  foresters,  German 
engineers,  were  to  be  found  in  every  part  of  the 
Empire.     A  casual  reading  of  the  post-office 


248  GREAT  RUSSIA 

directories  of  Moscow,  or  Petersburg,  or  Kiev, 
provides  a  most  instructive  commentary  on  the 
extent  of  the  German  domination. 

XIII 

Securely  entrenched  in  the  Russian  Court,  in 
the  army,  in  the  bureaucracy,  in  the  universi- 
ties, in  the  diplomatic  service — the  Germans  se- 
cured a  no  less  commanding  influence  in  trade 
and  industry.  As  we  already  pointed  out,  Rus- 
sia until  recent  years  had  remained  an  agricul- 
tural country  without  a  middle  class.  The 
trade  remained  almost  entirely  in  foreign  hands. 
Already  in  the  Middle  Ages,  Russian  cities,  like 
Novgorod,  were  affiliated  to  the  German  Han- 
seatic  League.  In  the  sixteenth  century  ad- 
venturous English  explorers  and  traders,  whose 
exploits  are  amongst  the  most  thrilling  of  "Hak- 
luyt's  Voyages,"  tried  to  oust  their  German  com- 
petitors, but  they  utterly  failed.  The  Russians 
themselves  are  excellent  traders,  and  the  mer- 
chant guilds  of  Moscow  have  been  for  centuries 
a  powerful  commercial  organization.  Even  to- 
day you  will  meet  in  Moscow  unassuming  Rus- 
sian merchants  leading  the  simplest  of  lives  and 
possessed  of  enormous  wealth.  But  the  Rus- 
sian merchant  is  generally  conservative,  unen- 


RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY        249 

terprising,  a  bad  linguist,  and  servilely  attached 
to  ancient  usages.  He  is  scarcely  a  match  for 
the  foreigner.  In  recent  years  British  and  Bel- 
gian traders  as  well  as  Jews  and  Armenians  have 
shared  in  the  enormous  trade  of  the  Russian 
Empire,  but  the  Germans  have  secured  the  lion's 
share. 

And  what  is  true  of  Russian  trade  is  equally 
true  of  Russian  industry.  The  liberal  economic 
policy  of  Witte  has  created  in  one  generation 
powerful  industrial  centres  in  Central  Russia, 
and  especially  in  Poland.  Here  again  the  Ger- 
mans have  benefited  more  than  all  their  com- 
petitors together.  Lodz,  the  "Manchester  of 
Russian  Poland,"  has  ceased  to  be  either  Polish 
or  Russian,  and  has  become  a  German  manu- 
facturing town.  Caprivi,  Bismarck's  successor, 
negotiated  with  the  Russian  Government  a 
treaty  of  commerce  which  gave  enormous  ad- 
vantages to  German  industry  and  if  the  German 
Government  had  continued  to  show  the  wisdom 
of  Bismarck  and  Caprivi,  Germany  would  cer- 
tainly have  profited  more  than  any  other  coun- 
try by  the  commercial  expansion  of  the  Russian 
Empire. 


250  GREAT  RUSSIA 

XIV 

It  might  have  been  expected  that  a  German  in- 
fluence so  absolutely  supreme  in  every  sphere 
of  society,  in  every  walk  of  life  should  have  ex- 
tended to  the  lower  classes.  But  the  common 
people  were  never  affected  by  German  methods 
and  remained  untainted  by  the  German  spirit. 
To  the  Russian  moujik,  the  German  remained 
the  Niemets,  the  mute,  the  alien  enemy.  The 
Russian  peasant,  with  his  simple  ways  and  his 
child-like  faith,  a  mystic  and  an  idealist,  has  an 
instinctive  antipathy  to  the  modern  Prussian 
who  is  an  implacable  realist,  selfish,  calculating 
and  aggressive.  The  persistence  with  which  the 
Russian  people  have  resisted  and  escaped  Prus- 
sian influence  is  not  the  least  convincing  proof 
of  the  soundness  of  the  Slav  character. 

XV 

We  have  seen  German  influence  supreme  in  the 
province  of  the  practical,  the  tangible,  the  use- 
ful. It  is  all  the  more  remarkable  that  it 
should  be  insignificant  in  the  sphere  of  the 
ideal  and  of  the  beautiful.  In  art  and  liter- 
ature the  influence  of  Germany  has  been 
purely  superficial  although  the  beautiful  Rus- 


RUSSIA  AND  GERMANY       251 

sian  language  has  often  been  spoiled  by  the 
influence  of  a  cumbrous  German  syntax.  With 
the  exception  of  Nietzsche,  no  German  writer 
has  left  his  mark  on  Russian  literature.  The 
literary  influence  of  Great  Britain  has  been 
much  more  extensive  and  has  grown  enormously 
during  the  last  generation.  But  it  is  the  lit- 
erature of  France  which  has  been  the  dominant 
factor  in  the  literary  life  of  modern  Russia. 
The  fascination  of  French  culture  has  been  as 
old  as  Russian  culture.  Catherine  II  was  the 
friend  of  Diderot  and  Voltaire  and  herself  trans- 
lated French  masterpieces  into  Russian.  The 
French  language  has  been  the  language  of 
diplomacy  and  society.  Readers  of  "War  and 
Peace"  will  remember  how  the  noblemen  of  the 
Petersburg  salons  denounced  the  French  usurper 
in  the  language  of  Voltaire. 

XVI 

We  have  sufficiently  proved  that  Germany  has 
been  a  formidable  factor  in  the  whole  past  his- 
tory of  the  Russian  Empire.  We  may  hope 
that  after  the  war  German  influence  will  be  a 
thing  of  the  past.  After  the  war  it  is  not  Ger- 
man political  ideas  and  German  institutions,  but 
French  and  British  ideas  and  institutions  which 


252  GREAT  RUSSIA 

will  mould  the  destinies  of  the  Russian  Empire. 
The  elective  affinities  between  the  Russian  de- 
mocracy and  the  French  and  British  democracies 
will  assert  themselves  and  will  eliminate  the 
mischievous  and  reactionary  influence  of  Ger- 
many. 

We  have  seen  how  entirely  German  power 
has  been  artificial  and  imposed  from  above,  how 
it  has  been  the  outcome  of  the  dynastic  connec- 
tion. But  in  the  meantime  the  German  influ- 
ence^ supreme  before  the  war,  still  subsists  and 
still  constitutes  a  danger  which  it  would  be  ex- 
tremely unwise  and  unstatesmanlike  to  ignore 
or  to  under-rate.  We  must  therefore  guard 
ourselves  so  that  when  the  day  of  settlement 
comes  the  subtle  and  subterranean  German 
forces  shall  not  make  themselves  felt,  and  that 
the  Teutonic  monarchies  shall  be  frustrated  in 
their  supreme  effort  to  retain  a  power  which  has 
been  so  fatal  to  the  liberties  of  Europe  and  to 
the  free  development  of  the  Russian  people. 


UN1vERs1TvoFcAuFoRN1AAT-;--ES 
THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 

^oo*  is  »V*  on  *•  -t  date  staged  *e!ow 

MAY  5     19471  ' 

WAR  2  B  1949 

OV  30  1951 

Jan  19   '59 


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SEP  6    ^ 
JUN   19  1945| 

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Form  L-9-15w-7,'35 


UNIVERSITY  of  CALlFORNi 

LOS  ANGELES 
LIBRARY 


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